There Is No Junk Mail

A direct-mail man was once asked how he could live with himself, sending out all that junk. There is no junk mail, he said. There are junk people. He meant it as a defense and it isn’t one, but buried in the ugliness is the only useful theory of slop I know, and it starts by denying that slop is a thing at all. Consider the Nigerian prince — the email so transparently absurd that receiving it feels like an insult to your intelligence. It is the purest garbage in your inbox, and it is fabulously profitable. Those two facts are supposed to be in tension and they are not. The absurdity is not incompetence; it is engineering. A scam that reads as plausible wastes the scammer’s time on marks who will wise up before they pay. The implausibility is a filter, tuned to repel everyone with the sense to hesitate and retain only the tiny residue who won’t. The email is not badly written. It is precisely written, to fail for you and land on the one person in a hundred thousand it was built to…