What’s been clogging our inbox most recently?
1 URGENT BUSINESS
This email from a Mr Dirk Moss starts well. Clearly wishing to show the urgency of his urgent business, he makes good use of his caps lock in the subject line. An exclamation mark might have been even more effective, but alas it was not to be. Anyway, Dirk is the “Chief Financial Officer of Bank in Europe”, and one his customers recently died, leaving $60 million just sitting in an account, with no next of kin to claim it. The only logical solution, of course, is to give it to us. And with our Christmas shopping yet to be completed, this windfall couldn’t have come at a better time.
2 I wish to know if we can work to gether
“Good day,” begins Barrister Alfred Kendrick, immediately helping us warm to this chap. He could have just said ‘Hi’ or ‘Wassup’, but no, he wants us to have a good day. What’s not to like about that? Even better, just like our new friend Dirk Moss, Alfred is trying to offload some cash that belonged to a now “deaceased” client, and he’d like us “to stand as the Next of Kin to my deceased client who made some deposit sum of money in millions united states dollars”.
Sounds interesting, but we’re not entirely sure how many millions he’s talking about, plus he wants to “share in the ratio of 50/50”. Yes, he wants half our cash – and for what? Shuffling a few papers around and getting a few signatures. No thank you!
3 GOOD NEWS!!
Any email that has the subject line ‘good news’ in block capitals gets our vote of approval, but this email goes the extra mile by including not one but two – yes, two! – exclamation marks. Fantastic work. The provider of this emphatic punctuation? Mr UCH SMART, a man so excited about life he writes his name in capital letters. UCH is a member of MMM Global (which has nothing to do with Micro Mart), “a community where people help each other financially”, and it “helps millions of participants worldwide to find those who NEED help, and those who are ready to PROVIDE help for FREE.”
We only have one question: “Where DO we SIGN up?”
4 Congratulations!!!
Okay, now we’re just being spoilt: three exclamation marks! But what do you expect from a firm like “NOKIA Company Limited UK”? Well, yes, you might expect it to have its own email addresses, rather than sending us things via “patrick@shane7.freeserve.co.uk”, but what really matters here (other than the fact people still use Freeserve email addresses) is that we’ve won £500,000, as part of Nokia/Microsoft’s “struggle to alleviate poverty”. We’re not sure how randomly giving away half a million quid via email is a struggle, but who are we to argue? A couple more wins like this and we’ll be able to buy Nokia ourselves.
5 Offer Letter
Finally, we come to a message from Mr Beno Hamadi, “a Business Relationship Manager with one of the banks in Nairobi, Kenya.” He’s a much a more serious sounding fellow than our other new friends, using a total of zero exclamation marks in his email, and he totally forgot to tell us which bank he actually works for in Nairobi, but we’ll forgive him, since he’s letting us in on a “discreet and lucrative sensitive business venture”. Again, the details of this venture are oddly absent, but if we can’t trust a man whose Christian name sounds like our favourite comic book, then frankly life isn’t worth living.