Author thought literary prize email was spam

[Brian G Turner]

A fun little morning news story:
Author thought A$200k literary prize was spam - BBC News

 

[thaddeus6th]

Ha, understandable.

On a much smaller note, I was offered some free publicity for Bane of Souls, and thought it was dubious at first, but the chap in question was genuine. Can't say how much it helped, but he did tweet about it regularly for a pretty long period.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Now we will all get the fake "you won a literary prize" spam now that this has had publicity!
Along with the ISP refunds, fake survey offers, water charge refunds, Electricity refunds, Tax refunds, shipping notifications, winning MS competitions and winning lottery tickets.

 

[PeteMC]

Bless her, that's brilliant! And a seriously impressive prize too

 

[E.Maree]

Lovely. I'd never heard of this award before, it's a very interesting way of running things.

 

[DrMclony]

What a wonderful surprise that would be! I had a (non literary) property of mine pursued last year for commercial use, would have been big dollars. They used a contact I do not monitor, a spam catcher account if you will, and it was six months before I knew about it, by which time they moved on to somebody else.

 

[Overread]

New like this gives postmen faith that they'll have jobs for generations to come - because people won't believe spam and thankfully posting stuff costs money and thus we don't get reams of spam in our mail system (ok we get some but nothing like what we get in our emails).

Of course if sending physical letters ever became free - imagine the bulk of printed letters from Nigerian Princes and dubious tax returns that would appear.

 

[Montero]

Was talking scam stuff with an older friend a while back and he said before email the fax machine in his office would spew forth dubious offers, including Nigerian ones.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

The "new Nigeria" is something called Stripe.
I've marked it as spam about ten times, yet they still get into my Inbox.
AI?

 

[Overread]

Mostly I think the spam inbox works on bulk across servers; so chances are its just new and takes a few reports before the software can pick up the common traits to auto dump them all in to the spamfolder.

 

[Vladd67]

One way of dealing with spammers.