Is it just me, or is anyone else finding that the tone of spam e-mails has taken a turn for the more friendly recently?

Over the years, I’ve become accustomed – indeed, almost numb – to e-mails trying to incite me to buy v1@gra and c1ali$ by offering me startling amounts of ejaculate*, or the ability to perform as if I were an actor in an adult straight-to-DVD feature, or even (less enticingly) to have a member capable of breaking wood, if not harming one’s partner on some level.

But now, after a strange transitional phase when many spam e-mails appeared to be doing some kind of Burroughs-meets-Joyce cut-up text merge thing (frequently including long passages of text which, even more bizarrely, featured religious references), the majority of spam I receive now seems more polite, more positive, and in places, even literary.

For example, my spam filter this morning caught uninvited items with the following titles trying to sneak into the exclusive party that is my inbox:
To be or not to be. To be… (x3)
I show you how far the rabbit hole goes
You can…
Take a pride with Cial!s!
Wanna be like me?
Be happy! 🙂
Are you insecure?

You see? It almost feels as if they care about me, or at least want to engage in a genuine dialogue with me.

I mean, they’ve got a long way to go before they seem even remotely as friendly as those nice chaps from Nigeria who want to give me the money which is rightly owed to me by the fallen regime there, but it’s good to know that the people who are willing to fulfil all my sex-chemical needs read Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, and want to ensure that my mind is as free of insecurity and unhappiness as it is from thwarted sexual desires.

*That’s the noun there, not the verb. Pronounced as if ’twere rhyming with “consulate”.