This past Sunday, I received an email from “Do Not Reply” with the subject line “Vehicle Registration Renewal Reminder”. Here’s what it looked like:

This is a very, very bad email, beginning with the awful A.I. slop image at the top. Here’s a larger look at just that:

Lest you have any doubts whatsoever as to the origin of this image, note that they didn’t even crop out the Gemini logo from the bottom right. While I’ve compressed the image above, was a needlessly large 760 KB png file. Awful.

When I saw this email, I was quite certain it was a phishing scam. I assumed that the link inside would take me to a scammy replica of a government website, one that would steal credit card numbers. But no! As far as I can determine, this is a legitimate email from the RMV.¹ The lone link in it does indeed go to http://mass.gov/rmv, which forwards on to the official RMV site.² And indeed, my car registration is expiring in a couple of months.

In the past, I have always received an official form in the mail which can be used to renew my registration. For many years, that letter has simply prompted me to go online to renew. Given that, a switch to email notifications make sense. They sure ought to look a lot more official than this, however.

Footnotes:

1. What’s most often known as the “Department of Motor Vehicles” (DMV) is indeed called the “Registry of Motor Vehicles” (RMV) in Massachusetts. Why? Just to be difficult, I assume. But we’re far from the only ones. ↩︎

2. I’m not sure why the original link is http:// rather than https://, but the forward does lead to a secure page. ↩︎

I’ve recently received a higher than average number of dumb emails. Let’s talk about a few of them.

Subject Lines From Dumb Emails I’ve Recently Received

• ***Attention requested, Paul: You’re getting the latest about these scams
  Oh boy, hot scam news! And yes, those asterisks were in the subject line.

• Spring fun begins now, %%Informal Greeting%!
  Presumably, the mailing software for this message would’ve replaced the variable %%Informal Greeting%% with, I don’t know, “friend”, or “amigo”, or “buckaroo”. But whoops, they left off a % and the whole thing broke.

• We’ve Updated Our Terms of Use
  I’m sure the lawyers think they’re best served by letting everyone know about fine print updates, but Shake Shack, I really, really do not care about your terms of use. I buy a better-than-you’d-expect Veggie Shack from you perhaps twice a year, and that’s the entirety of our relationship.

• We’ve Updated Our Terms of Use
  Bonus, Shack Shake sent me the exact same message ten days later. I’m not sure if they felt it important to remind me about the change, or if they actually updated their terms of use twice in quick succession. You know, because I didn’t actually read the terms for buying a veggie burger.

• Learn more about our updated Terms of Service
  I don’t want to, Google. I’m also not going to read about “Updates to Google Play Terms of Service” that you emailed about three days later.

• Your credit score has changed-here’s how
  When I opened this email, I learned that my credit score had dipped by exactly one point. Capital One even included a graphic:

  

  They did not, however, include my actual score within the email. That might have been mildly helpful, though I’m confident that a change of one point is very much just noise.

• Paul, you’re no longer enrolled in CreditWise from Capital One
  After receiving the previous email, I sought a way to turn off these pointless notifications. Capital One said “If you no longer want to receive these emails, unfortunately you’ll have to unenroll from CreditWise.” OK then.

You might think this points to a method of getting fewer dumb emails, by having fewer accounts overall. Alas, even that strategy seems imperfect. Back in February, I cancelled my Alliant credit card and closed my account entirely. Nevertheless, as I was writing this post, I received an email from them. The subject line? “Your July Alliant credit card statement is now available online”