How Would you like Some Spam in Your Story?

Here's something interesting I received in the email recently: a story spam.

Specifically, someone sent in a pseudo-submission with this intro:

From: samuel ansah asare
Date: Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 6:44 PM
Subject: SUBMISSION OF MY 7500 WORDS OF SHORT STORIES.
To: estranghero@gmail.com

NAME :MR. SAMUEL ERNEST ANSAH ASARE,
P.O.BOX 1049,
KANESHIE-ACCRA.
GHANA.
TELEPHONE NUMBERS: +233(0)242517475, +233(0)267307499

NOTE :PLEASE IF I WIN FOR MY 7500WORDS OF MY SPECULATIVE SHORT STORIES, KINDLY USE MY REAL NAME MR.ERNEST ASARE IN MAKING WESTERN UNION TO SEND MY CASH OF PRIZE OF MONEY TO ME. MY GHANAIAN NATIONAL VOTER ID CARD IS MISSING SO DO NOT USE SAMUEL AS A WESTERN UNION TO ME IN GHANA.

So there I was thinking, "A submision from Ghana? WTF!" Below the email addresses was the whole text of the story copy-pasted directly into the email body. And not just one story, but three stories (which means he can't count worth 7,500 obviously).

But what made this doubly-interesting was when-- on a whim-- I googled the first line of the first story and what came out was Eugene Fisher's Husbandry in Strange Horizons. The others were Nira and I by Shweta Narayan, The Spider in You by Sean E. Markey, and Turning the Apples by Tina Connolly. A-ha! The plot thickens!

The web administrator of Strange Horizons-- after I notified them-- had it right: that's embarrassing, finding your work now part of a spreading spam-mail worldwide. But I figured, it's a shame the spammers didn't include the writers' names: that's one hell of an advertising trick for the writers, don't you think?

I sometimes like to imagine that the Underside of the Internet is this strange, grotesque, creepy, and wonderful where things like spam and viruses breed and proliferate...