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Ask HN: Why is the wording and grammar on SPAM Emails so bad?

1 points by testrufus ↗ HN
I am still receiving a fair amount of SPAM each month (5 E-Mails maybe). But for years, they still don't have proper grammar, spelling or even the right greeting.

If you have the resources to send thousands (if not millions) of these E-Mails, wouldn't you take 1 week to actually compose them rightly, hire a translater for a week or whatever?

4 comments

[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] thread
Black101
Maybe they tested both and get more replies when they are composed this way? Or maybe they get around more spam filters?
metaloha
I forget if this effect has a name, but I believe that the inclusion of incorrect grammar and spelling is exactly what convinces a certain subset of the population that the message is genuine. They don't completely trust messages that are super polished, preferring to give more weight to things that they perceive as "written by a human somewhere."

In some cases, these are people with a strong distrust of "mainstream" communications, possibly assuming that anything written well or from certain sources carries an agenda that they don't want to be part of. In other cases, people may just be naive enough to believe that a company with a professional writer on staff wouldn't need their money and that therefore a company without a professional writer (which then writes with occasionally poor grammar and spelling) is more in need of support. In yet other situations, people may have become over-zealous in their support for social sensitivity and feel a strong urge to "help that poor boy in Nigeria."

There are probably a lot more reasons this works on certain people, and a lot more types of people that this works on.

simonblack
Remember that spam emails are from people who have no other way of getting a reasonable income. As such, they are generally people who have never had the advantages of better education and better parenting, that most of us non-spamming people have.

So naturally, they also don't have the advantage of having better grammar and better spelling than us as well.