When mail gets into the wrong folder ....

Dear Major Ralph,

Thank you for submitting your essay before the deadline. My comments are below.

Hello, I am Major Ralph Harland, I am a British officer attached to UN peace Keeping force in Iraq, I am the commanding officer of the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, as you may know everyday, there are several cases of insurgent’s attacks and suicide bombs going on here.
What is it that I know every day? That you are the commanding officer of the First Battalion, or that there is an insurgent who attacks several times?

Incidentally, I was under the impression that the CO1 of the First Battalion of the RIR was Lieutenant-Colonel McGovern, and that this regiment is in Iraq as part of something called the Coalition of the Willing, which is not aligned to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Apart from anything else, there is no peace to keep.

We managed to Move funds belonging to some demised persons who were attacked and killed through insurgent attacks.
"Demise" is a noun, not a verb, and therefore cannot take the passive voice. Please consult the Chicago Manual of Style for advice on capitalisation.

The total amount is US$9.5 Million dollars in cash.
Find a good dictionary and look up the word "redundancy".

We want to move this money to you, so that you may keep our share for us until when we shall come over to meet you.
You have managed to combine ellipsis with verbosity. I am impressed.

We will take 60%, my partner and I.
Is that a reference to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? If so, you can have bonus points for intertextuality. If not, I suggest you employ simpler syntax.

You take 40%. No strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a war zone.

I know I have blogged about asyndeton being a rhetorical device of noble ancestry, but that, my friend, is a double comma-splice, and no amount of quotation from Aristotle's Rhetoric will let you off the hook.

We plan on using Diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in two large metallic boxes, using diplomatic immunity. If you are interested I will send you the full details; my aim is to find a good partner that we can trust and assist us can you be trusted?
I congratulate you on your artful use of the semi-colon; however, the effect is somewhat spoiled by crashing the following clause into a question.

By the way, with that insurgent around, it might be better to use actual metal boxes rather than ones which are merely metallic.

When you receive this letter, kindly send me an e-mail here majorralphharland@yahoo.co.uk, or majorralpharland@aol.co.uk signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication and also your contact details.

Am I to assume that my telephone and fax numbers are not part of my contact details?

This business is 100% risk free.

While I normally recommend that essays finish with a strong conclusion, I feel there is a danger of over-stating your case here, especially since you provide no citations for this figure.

See you in summer school,

Dr. Solri

The Compleat Spammer

Thanks to subbes, I've just read Dave Barry's wonderful review of Send, the latest Netiquette guide to hit the bookshelves. I find the idea of a book on how to write e-mail rather odd, like a radio programme about television, but I shouldn't be prejudiced. After all, I own a weighty tome about writing web applications in PHP and MySQL, which is very useful; for example, it is exactly the right thickness to use as a pillow when doing the Alexander Technique lying-on-the-floor exercise.

Seriously though, I'm sure Send is a valuable resource for those who want to write better e-mails. The problem is that most of the poeple who write annoying e-mails aren't interested in improving them, in much the same way that people who can't be bothered to use a spell-checker are unlikely to read The Chicago Manual of Style. Spammers, in particular, are not going to read this book, so what we need is a guide to spamming etiquette which can be mass-mailed to all spammers. (Of course this would only be a brief summary; for the full version, they would need to visit our website to by the CD, which comes complete with over 1,000 programs that the government doesn't want you to know about!)

Here is the kind of thing I'm thinking about.

1. Send the kind of spam you would like to receive.
Do you have a small penis? Do you even have one at all? In either case, do you want to be reminded of the fact?

2. Reply promptly
When people want viagra, they want it now.

3. Don't deny who you are; be proud of it.
76% of Internet downloads are pornography and 85% of all e-mail is spam. Actually, I made those figures up, but they probably aren't far from the truth; the point is that by spamming, you are contributing to the development of the information superhighway (largely by ensuring that they will need to build extra lanes to cope with the traffic). If your spam contains links to pornographic sites, that's even better. So don't try to disguise your spam by pasting in pages of novels or technical manuals; proclaim it loudly: "Spam spam-spaaaam, loverly spam!"

4. Don't forget the personal touch
One of the problems with e-mail is its anonymity, and this is particularly true when you are sending mails to millions of recipients. Nevertheless, there are some things you can do to give your spam the personal touch. Ask about the kids, for example: "How are the kids doing? Are they embarrassed by their penis size too?" or just "High res pr0n films 4 yr kidz!!"

5. Cultivate a suitable writing style.
Walk like an Egyptian, write like a Nigerian. The 419, or "Nigerian scam", is the apogee of spamming style. It matters not that anyone with such a high position in Nigerian society (oil minister, bank owner, widow of deceased dictator) probably has a secretary who was educated at Eton; the 419 is an art form, and one must respect its conventions. On the other hand, if you are pretending to be a major in the British army (see previous post), you should not attempt to treat "demise" as though it were a verb. That is for majors in the US army.