I looked through my spam folder, and quickly appreciated how much better email-filters have improved in the past decade. Emails in my spam folder were nearly universally proper spam (instead of correct emails), though I did find some legitimate correspondence lost there.

Recurring themes in my spam included the ubiquitous Nigerian Prince narrative – a rich “damsel in distress” persona who lost access to their funds and needs some capital to get it back, Viagra-esque and hooker low-effort commercials, and other emails designed to convince me to give away my personal information. A particularly interesting deviation from my expectations occurred when I discovered emails designed to sneak in with my daily-life emails: an invitation to a bogus conference with a registration form, an internship interview request to a software-looking company, a notice masquerading as a real MIT account asking for confirmation of financial aid/tuition/email quota. Spam and spam filters have gone through some kind of arms race – both becoming increasingly tailored to user/target habits in attempts to outwit their opponents.

The articles make mention of the social/political context surrounding the recent explosion in sheer quantity of sent scam messages. Scam emails started in Nigeria (turns out “Nigerian Prince” is contextually accurate) as a result of economic and political unrest, when fairly-educated-and-now-unemployed people turned their efforts and internet access to online exploitation. But this is the same context given for the rise of gangs, terrorist groups, what have you – the world, both corporeal and online, is full of unsavory people. I still have little empathy for people who choose to spend their time taking advantage of others.

Also– there’s this guy, James Veitch. He gave a TED-talk recently (December) about scam emails, and I thought it was cool: Video