Finally, a task that lets me make use of all the spam email I receive!

I'm not much of a poet, but I thought I should give this a try. First of all, I wanted to write a poem that expressed my feelings over the amount of spam that I receive. Second, I wanted to try to make use of as many spam message as possible. Third, I wanted to use "real" spam messages as opposed to the typical Nigerian scam email. Scam email tends to be pretty coherent (as far as spam goes) so it would be too easy to pick out phrases/words to use in my poem. I also decided to ignore the paragraphs of text that sometimes appear at the end of a spam message. The ones they add to confuse spam filters.

Yes, I wanted to make this somewhat of a challenge in addition to my meager poetic skills.


Today's haul of source material? 297 spam messages!
Also, I noticed that I get spam in all kinds of languages I don't even speak. Bonjour mon amie....


Anyways, after actually reading 145 spam messages I picked out 16 spam messages. One for the title, and the rest for the "body". That's right, the title of my poem as well as each line come from a different spam message. I haven't added any extra text or punctuation or anything like that (well, except for the "Ode to Spam" part of the title).



So here goes:





Ode to Spam: Not for oversmart people

Everyone wants
To claim your prize,


If you have tried
and nothing worked
read this


time waste

you are aged

lose your weight


Say NO


Never lose
and Don't miss
and never give up...


assist your body in burning


you'll dig the rest, I bet!
so why dont you?