Despite having two different fairly sophisticated mail filtering systems, spam occasionally still slips into my inbox. I generally delete these emails, but every so often, one of them catches my eye. So it was with this email:

Subject: Incriminating photos of my grandma taking it off

Oh. Huh. Well, I’d never really thought about it before, but I guess that by and large I don’t want to see anyone’s grandmother naked. It was pretty easy to ignore this email. However, it got me thinking about the shock tactics used in spam. I quickly realized that with one edit, the click rate on this email would likely go way up.

Subject: Incriminating photos of your grandma taking it off

To be sure, I don’t imagine many people will want to see that either. However, if you’re thinking “Oh god, no! Not my nana!”, it seems more likely that you’ll click into the email and get sucked into buying whatever garbage they’re shilling.

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