MP3.com Spam

One of the umpteen-gazillion spams I get each day arrived this morning in my Inbox. For this particular email account, for which I use Pine to read mail, I receive lots of "Partner Announcements" from MP3.com. In other words, spam from companies who have cut deals with MP3 to use their fabled spam cannon.

Now, I have no idea what this looks like in HTML, since one of the reasons I have much of the spam go to this account is because I use Pine, a VT100-old-school-style mail reader, to read the mail.

The first question that comes to mind from this spam is, who goofed on the spelling of the partner's name? "MUISCMATCH"? And it wasn't enough to make the typo once, or even twice: try eight times. Yelling at you! Get MUISCMATCH Jukebox now! Fool, I'm talkin' to you! Go get MUISCMATCH now before I break out this can o' whoop-ass! Do it! You listening to me? I pity the fool who fails to download MUISCMATCH Jukebox right this very second!

Out of curiosity, I forwarded this multipart-MIME email to another of my accounts, one which I read using Eudora. I was curious to see what the message looked like in Eudora. It turned out to show something completely different there. The message reads, in part:

Subject: It's Your Music. Play it. Rip it. Burn it.

====================================
MP3.com Partner Product Announcement
====================================

///MUSICMATCH

Download MUSICMATCH Jukebox Plus 7.5

>> Burn at Speeds of up to 40x

>> Faster MP3 Recording

>> Enhanced Super Tagging

PC Magazine Editors' Choice:
Best Music Player - 4 years in a row!

Fine. Only, MusicMatch just recently released, with much fanfare, version 8.0... why promote the old version? Somebody oughta let this particular bumbling MP3.com Partner know. But then they might fix it, and where's the fun in that?

By the way, typing in www.muiscmatch.com takes you not to MusicMatch, but to MP3-Network.com. Good for them. I bet they get a ton of traffic out of it.

Posted by brian at June 6, 2003 09:14 AM