Like shooting fish in a barrel. At point-blank range. With an elephant gun!

A colleague of mine got this e-mail sent to him earlier today:

Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 10:11:54 -0400
From: Roger Smith <Roger.smith@maila1.com>
To: John Levine
Subject: John, Maximize your database by adding Email addresses

Hi John,

Does Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail have records without email addresses in its internal database? Would you like to acquire that information? If your answer is yes, in just a few weeks, your organization can substantially increase - even double - its number of valid email addresses in its database using our email appending service.

Email address is one such information that most of the companies do not have in their database and in today's World email is the most economical way of communicating to people. It simply helps you save money on postal charges or telemarketing for that matter which is expensive.

John, If you do have a business database and want to append email addresses to communicate with your customers, we can help. We assure a fast turnaround and you pay only for appended records that don't opt-out ? Send us 50 records from your database and we could do a test append ? at no cost!

If there is someone else in your organization that I need to speak with in this regard, please let me now [sic].

Regards,

Roger Smith
800-886-1838
http://www.emailappenders.net

How NOT to file a bug report

Okay, so like, there's this medium-risk bug in PHP 5.0.3, but we're not going to tell you what it is. Never mind that it's trivial to diff the sources between it and 5.0.4, we're just going to instead ask you to upgrade to 5.0.4 without telling you what the vulnerability is and actually--you know, make an informed decision as to whether any workarounds can be applied, or, if an upgrade is necessary, how soon we need to perform that upgrade.

Twits.