letters
to an unknown audience
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~
From the Spam Bag/  /June 22, 2003
For those readers who are interested in the new media and its hijackings, here's a good one:
Hey recipient@emailaddr.ess

MTV is looking to gather contestants for a brand new reality show. All who receive this email and enter the promotional code 1203 have a good chance of acceptance to the show. For more information visit www.mtv.com/reality for more details.

Good luck.

If you're foolish enough to be reading email in HTML mode, you'll find upon clicking the link that it doesn't go to www.mtv.com/reality, which is in fact a dead end; instead it gives you a page at mtvshows.vze.com with nothing but a banner ad. This will fall under trademark infringement, I assume. But the slope must be slippery: "MTV is looking to gather contestants for a brand new reality show" may well be a true statement. The page therein linked has the title "MTV Reality Shows" but has no content related to MTV; does that count as promoting your own product under MTV's trademark?

[In the "Dept of Thinking Like a Spammer": Presumably the "promotional code" 1203 was selected because 123, being just a fragment of a combination an idiot would have on his luggage, would give up the jig too early.]

UPDATE: Would it be effective to fill every web page with a bunch of phony email addresses, so that spammers trying to scrape them would end up wasting a big fraction of their time sending out unsolicited messages to domains that don't exists? In effect filling the spammers' lists with lots of, well, spam?

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