Ask HN: What's with the Spam recipes in Gmail´s spam folder?

2 points by eraad ↗ HN
Does anyone know the story behind the "spam" recipes in the Gmail Spam folder?

3 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 15.9 ms ] thread
Okay you need to be a bit more specific - since I, for one, do not have spam recipes in my Gmail spam folder (the spam musubi recipe definitely doesn't count as, err, spam).
I take it you are referring to the Google-style plain text ads for Spam (the meat product) recipes that appear if you look into your Gmail spam folder.

I think Hormel

http://www.hormel.com/

simply has a sense of humor about Spam.

http://www.spam.com/games/Museum/default.aspx

I presume Hormel and Google have some kind of business arrangement (maybe just a conventional online advertisement contract) by which the ads appear on Gmail. I think it's amusing.

I first thought it was an automatic contextual ad but yesterday, after years of using Gmail, figured out that they were intentionally there, since the text links don`t seem to have a click-through URL typically used to track Google`s ads.