2:59

The following odd and wonderful things have been found stuffed in the apartment mailbox in the past week.

First the saga of Sony’s rootkit reparations has come to a close with the delivery of an unmolested CD and $8.40 worth of justice. The mailing was fairly quick and they actually took the effort to contact me when an earlier shipment attempt failed (UPS and my apartment building are ancient enemies). All in all the whole process was fairly drama free, which is a nice surprise. Granted an overwrought tale painting Sony as the Evil Empire would have done wonders for my traffic.

This following letter scares me.

This you should recognize as a 419 scam, which I’m sure you see in your email inbox from time to time. However this I received through the mail, which blows my mind as it breaks the entire fundamental truth about spam. It costs essentially nothing to send a massive amount of email — but it costs the price of a stamp to send a letter. Even with a low response rate email spammers still make money due to that low cost of delivery, real physical letters can’t match that.
This letter was in a hand written envelope sent within Canada to “White Adam” and the sender left off my apartment number. The letter itself was a printout of an email (the line in the left hand margin is likely the quoted original message). What’s more surprising is that the sender went over the letter with a pen and filled in a few missing areas (the underscore in the reply email must not have printed visibly). Would it not be quicker to fix the print out once and photocopy that? I guess the hand written envelope is supposed to lull me into a false sense of gullability, but that takes time as well.

For a fraud attempt I’m sort of underwhelmed. C plus, if that.

Not pictured are the wonderful first two Chuck Ragan 7″s, which Canada Post managed to cram into the exact 7″ mail slot in the most precarious way possible. If so much as the air pressure shifted they would have shattered. To remedy this issue, and to help poor criminals who forget to write apartment numbers: we’re buying a house.

Seriously. December 1st is the closing date. How’s that for a roundabout way of making an announcement?