One of the benefits (?) of being a biologist is receiving biotech spam in one's inbox, as this screenshot shows. I'm a little disturbed that the subject lines of emails advertising lab reagents are not readily distinguishable from those advertising adult pharmaceuticals.
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LOL. Fortunately for me, very little spam makes it to my inbox thanks to my organization hiring an outside company to do filtering for us. Of course, it catches some legit emails (especially when a collaborator of mine drops the occasional f-bomb) but we have access to the filtering and can release messages.
It is annoying however when companies like *cough* Invitrogen and *cough cough* Cole Parmer constantly ask me to do questionnaires. Hey peeps, I'm busy. If it doesn't come with "Free Stuff", I'm not doing it.
How strange! I am on a PhD track in Cognitive Psychology, and my spam looks just the same.. Only more rolexes (should be sent to the physics department), and Russian women that want to meet me (that would be the cultural anthropology dept., I guess). Apparently my studies in anatomical learning entitle me to the same spam that you get as a biologist ;-)
I have three or four email addresses, and get different types of spam at each. The virtual Russian women all go for a different address. This address is the only one that gets rt-PCR spam. There must be some sort of Venn diagram that would represent this, with certain types of spam overlapping simply because the lists of stolen emails used by those spammers overlap. . .
That would be the start of an Archeology of Spam! Spam as a chronological tool. I like the thought :)
It'd be a lot of work though. I know a guy who started a project much like that.. for some time, if he had to fill out his e-mail address for some web service, he would use a different address for each new site. That way he could track which address was sold (or otherwise acquired) by whom, and also when.
I don't remember him getting any clear results, possibly because spammers don't stick to a single message? It would get old real quick, being the King of Supersize, or the Santa of Nigerian money.
Google Spam Assassin.
Unless you enjoy reading some of the more witty subject lines that today's spammers come up with.
My email gets filtered, but I still have to trawl through the spambox periodically for legit/well-intentioned emails. People really ought to think about what they put in the subject line when they're emailing someone they've never been in contact with before.
Jan-Maarten,
Your friend probably didn't find much of a pattern because the biggest spammers use mailing lists obtained from address books pilfered via viruses/spyware. So it's often one of your friends or relatives to blame, not some random e-letter or merchant.