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Comment by danielodievich | Hacker News Reader

Close to 20 years ago I got an email that in it's entirety said "I have a powful tool. I suspect youd like it", exactly as written. No links, no attachments, just plain text. I showed it to my then girlfriend and now wife and since then we have adopted "powful tool" as a term we apply to really great devices or machinery of impressive heritage or even some good software. Warms my heart.

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> From: "Neateye" <NitaiGouranga@aol.com>

> Subject: Gouranga

> Call out Gouranga be happy!!!

> Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....

> That which brings the highest happiness!!

It’s been, fuck, two decades and this is still in my mbox. My wife and I still shout Gouranga at each other some days and, hell, who am I to argue that it doesn’t bring the highest happiness!!

Grand Theft Auto 1 taught me that one :) https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Hare_Krishna

> In GTA, the player received a 'GOURANGA' bonus for running over an entire procession of Hare Krishna. 'GOURANGA' is actually a term that was popularized as use by the Hare Krishna movement during the 1970s. It is often used to describe happiness. This is also a cheat code in the PC version of GTA 2.

Mine is "Only Spicy food gives me an Explosive Gain.", from https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Only-Spicy-Food-Gives-Me-an..., from back when TDWTF wasn't made up.

A cursory search gave back this gem. Same spam email in 2003 except it goes off on a tangent about a Symantec deal worth a lot of money (since someone mentioned they used Norton 2003) that someone used to buy a company sports car. Then people just keep talking about sports cars.

https://www.mail-archive.com/membersozdat@datascribe.com.au/...

I’ve also gotten mysterious scam emails that contain no information. What’s their purpose?

If I had to guess, it’s a trick to get people engaged.

There’s no link or request for money, so people probably respond more often.

I imagine like many areas of persuasion (like interrogation), getting someone to start talking is the “foot in the door” that starts to snow ball, even if it’s not about anything relevant.

Laying the groundwork to beat a spam filter, probably. If a series of emails are read and not deleted, that does not seem like spam.

huh, that's an interesting point! Seems like a good idea to mark those as spam even if they are "harmless", in that case...

It's called "IP warming". When you send bulk emails, there are throttling limits and other things meant to decrease the ability of scammers. So to warm the IP up you have to send on it for awhile. These sorts of blank emails aren't the best way to do it, it's sloppy. But that's the goal.

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