Checking the spam folder gets amusing

I like the gmail spam filters a lot. They very rarely let anything junk mail wise through to my inbox, and rarely mark anything useful as spam. Since the latter does happen, I tend to take a quick glance through the junk mail folder before deleting them to make sure nothing showed up there that I actually want to read.

Generally speaking, most of the junk in there references gambling, male performance enhancers, porn videos, fake designer goods and the like, none of which actually interests me.

Recently however, some of the spammers have gotten more creative in their social engineering attempts, and have started using fake headlines that do not involve obviously delinquent celebrities as lures for their no doubt poisonous links. Here are a few examples:

McCain drops out of running
Tiger Woods retires from golf, cites lack of competition
British PM to quit
Beijing air pollution index rises, olympics cancelled
WalMart declares bankruptcy
Pfizer admits to unapproved drugs found in Viagra and withdraws millions of products

Now for someone who tries to keep up with the news to some extent, these might be interesting stories if they came up on a real news site on some other day than April First. As bits attached to obvious spam, they're not tempting at all.

They do however, provide a good chuckle, and make the dreary task of filtering the good apples out of the mass of bad ones a touch more enjoyable.