I decided to do some long overdue cleaning of my spam folder (which is teeming with 11,000 messages — need to set up the auto-delete on old spam) and I was quickly scanning the names of senders to make sure no one I cared about got caught in the trap, when the name of my 4th grade teacher jumped to my attention — a name that isn’t common in the least, but there she was among “Alphonse Barnes” offering me discount pharmaceuticals, “Alvin Gardner” offering a hot stock tip, and “Andrea Parham” offering me help for. . . well, let’s just put it under the umbrella of “man problems.”
So what was my 4th-grade-teacher-turned-spam-robot trying to say to me? Don’t think youth can’t be returned. Freaky — I don’t think I’ve ever hit the delete key so hard.
Don’t think youth can’t be returned. Spam, in its sheer randomness and volume, has moved from easy plays on broadly-shared insecurities to messages that resonate with my own specific memories.
The spam monkeys are typing on the existential typewriter of my mind.
Chad Dickerson's blog 
Spam sender names are the most fascinating things — I would suspect they would make a wonderful dissertation topic. Their anthropological business value alone is wonderful. In ’87 when I was writing my dissertation it was very difficult to get email messsages to study, or even to write on the subject from a social-communications point of view. Now, with the web, the social space has exploded the areas of exploration. And when I was studying had I thought that SPAM would have been the big money maker, I would have changed topics to something more profitable — for email it’s spam and security that pop to the top. The rest is all settled in the middle.