Best Journal Spam E-Mail Ever?

Best predatory journal spam invite ever 🤣 pic.twitter.com/0hU7N9kauN

— Richard Sever Ⓤ (@cshperspectives) December 14, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Laura Kubatko.)

"International Conference on Newfangled Methods"

Huzzah!

They're not even trying anymore. How sad. pic.twitter.com/rHrk905Kex

— Grace Lindsay (@neurograce) July 1, 2018

"Infinite Moments of Incredible Delight"

I just got a spam e-mail with the title of "Infinite Moments of Incredible Delight" (or something like that), and naturally the first thing I wondered about was which was the first moment that was no longer finite. Of course, it then struck me that that would make a great title for a paper (or section thereof) involving probability theory or power laws.

Lt. Morgan Freeman?

Today I received a spam e-mail from "Morgan Freeman", so I opened it and read the first couple of lines:

"Pardon my intrusion; my name is Lieutenant Morgan Freeman, presently I'm on active duty in Iraq. Please, I have an obscured business proposal that will be of mutual benefit to both of us."

The correct response is, of course, no response. But the second best response is "You were great in Bruce Almighty."

I didn't bother reading the rest of the long e-mail.

"Cookies" Comes After "Ten"

The spam-protection question below is ambiguous. (It turned out that they were assuming that I should enter an integer.)

Damn! They Found My Super Secret Spy Name!

I just received a spam e-mail that starts in a very amusing way:

‎"Dear Dr. Not Found,

We would like to have an opportunity to work with you and develop monoclonal antibody libraries for your next target protein."

[The message is considerably longer, but I hope I have gotten the point across. :) ]

At Least it was Honest

I just got a spam e-mail titled "Spam Application for Summer Internship". At least the person who sent this to me was honest.

(This was one of the usual e-mails that are mail-merged rather than an application meant specifically for me out of sincere interest. "Spam" was actually in the title of this e-mail---it was not flagged as such by my e-mail server.)

Thermal Conductivity of SPAM

Check out Figure 2 of this article, which shows (among other things) a plot of the thermal conductivity of SPAM as a function of temperature. Nice! And it even looks like it might be a power law...

Your institution will need to have a subscription to this journal for you to see the other side of this link, but you can always e-mail me for a copy of the .pdf file if you don't otherwise have access to the paper.

(Tip of the cap to Jing Xu.)

False Positives

As some of you know, my spam filters have had a couple critical failures with respect to false positives.

In the last 24 or so hours, I have gotten 4 false positives, which is a far more frequent pace than I got before, so I'm wondering if I will need to alert the IMSS folks at Caltech. (I could also set up extra filters, but I've only noticed one pattern so far, and it wouldn't help for the other cases, which are the more important ones.) These four e-mail messages are two PR e-mails from Caltech (and it amuses me that these got flagged), an application letter from a prospective SURF student, and an e-mail from Brian Limketkai '98 sending new contact information. (Obviously, I am extremely annoyed that the last of these showed up as spam, because missing that message would have royally sucked.)

Grrrrrrr....