Spam emails

Here is a hilarious commentary from Carlos Guerra at the Express-News here in San Antonio…

Web Posted: 12/09/2008 12:00 CST

Alert: Spare me e-mail alerts about the end of the world

Don’t buy into everything you read, especially on the Internet.

More than a decade ago, I started adding an e-mail address at the end of my column for readers to contact me. It precipitated an avalanche of information that has led to incredible stories.

On the down side, my e-mail address is now on every spam list in the world, so I get e-mails in languages and alphabets I can’t even identify. One day, I got the same Nigerian letter advising me of my million-dollar good fortune in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

But the most amusing missives are the forwarded e-mails sent by new computer users who have just discovered the Internet. Most often users of AOL, formerly America Online, they send things I might not have seen before, almost all of which I have.

Many are alerts about impending cyber disasters. Last week, I got yet another warning I have been getting for at least a decade about a bogus bill pending before Congress to tax e-mail. How a hoax like that can exist so long befuddles me.

My all-time favorite, however, has to be the warning of the “ultimate virus” that, I am sure, was started as a joke but still gets sent out by people who don’t get it. This virus, I was warned, will “erase everything on your computer and any storage media within 20 feet of the infected computer, demagnetize the stripes on all of your credit and debit cards and change your pin number,” and “recalibrate your refrigerator, making all of your ice cream melt and your milk curdle” (at the same time), and “program all speed-dials on your cell phone to call 900 sex lines.”

Why people believe this message amazes me after it warns that the virus will “drink all of your beer, leave dirty socks on your coffee table when you’re expecting company and replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine” and “will cause you to do unusual things like running with scissors and throwing things in a way that is only fun until someone loses an eye, rewrite your back-up files, changing all of your active verbs to passive tense and incorporate undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretation of key sentences, leave your toilet seat up and your hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub and will not only remove forbidden tags from your mattresses, (it) will also refill your skim milk with whole milk (while) molecularly rearranging your cologne or perfume, causing it to smell like dill pickles.”

And if that isn’t enough, it will even “change hotel billings so your girl- or boyfriend’s hotel bill will be charged to your account while he or she is cheating on you.”

But most often, these e-mail spams — which are almost always multiple-forwarded messages — come from people with a fuzzy agenda who are gullible and don’t have a lot of smarts or research capability. The latest of these funnies came from eight readers, all in one day, all via AOL.

“(W)e’ll probably have to Take (sic) action since B. Hussein Obama (“Henry B. Hussein Obama,” according to one letter) won the election,” and “Texas is the only state with a legal right to secede from the Union (Reference the Texas-American Annexation Treaty of 1848.)”

Hate to disappoint you guys (and yes, they were all guys, and probably really dumb or old ones, or both), but according to the Yale Law School blog, which includes the text of the Texas-American Annexation Treaty, there is nothing in it that allows secession.

But more important, the treaty doesn’t exist.

“That treaty was submitted to the Senate on April 22, 1844,” the Yale blog notes, “and it was rejected by the Senate by a vote of sixteen ayes to thirty-five noes on the following June 8.”

So don’t get your hopes up about never having to say “President Obama.” [END]