Right now, in my in-box, I have spam messages with the subject headers

It’s Christa
It’s Claudia
It’s Clifton
It’s Freddie
It’s Hilary
It’s Hugo
It’s Jose
It’s Stacie

Are these all from the same person — and, if they’re not, are memos circulated among spammers to let them know about that day’s chosen format? Because I definitely notice patterns in the spam I get. One week, everybody’s hawking cheap Rolex watches or Viagra. The next week, they’ve all moved on to coffee makers or dietary supplements. But these new messages aren’t just similar products; here, the wording is almost exactly the same, no matter which e-mail address is purporting to have sent it. That’s why I’ve also got spam in my in-box with subject headers like

Keisha wrote:
Landon wrote:
Mariana wrote
Millard wrote:

And I still don’t understand why so much of it is addressed to “Barry.”

Although, you know, looking at most of it now, I see that they all have return addresses beginning with some permutation of “debora-“, so chances are good these did all come from the same person after all.

I’m continually amazed at how bad most spam is. Some of it, a very small percentage, seems almost believable, like those PayPal or eBay phishing scams. They’re equally reprehensible, and they don’t take a much to see through, but you can almost understand how someone might fall for them. Most spam, however, is just completely unbelievable, so over the top — so obviously spam — and that’s just compounded by the insistence these idiots have of sending out dozens upon dozens of similar messages to the same addresses every day.

If I get fifty messages saying, “It’s so-and-so,” even if I think I know who so-and-so is — if I know a Christa, or a Claudia, or a Hugo — I’m going to see that message stacked up against a ton of others and realize, oh, you know, that’s probably not my Christa or Claudia or Hugo. That’s probably just spam. And I’ll delete it, unopened and unread.