Well, socially speaking, there being more interest in First Lady-Elect Michelle Obama than in Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is a positive change, one that bodes well for society. On the flip side, as Inauguration Day nears, spammers are rewarding that renewed interest in affairs of state with an onslaught of junk mail.
Of the 1.4 million spam emails analyzed by SPAMfighter in December, Michelle Obama was the subject nearly five times as much as Britney Spears was, nearly six times as often as Paris Hilton, and ten times as much as Angelina Jolie.
Maybe spammers are making use of free online measurement tools like Google Trends to map out current spikes in interest. A Google Trends analysis shows Obama beating the former queens of the Internet lately as well.
Michelle isn’t nearly as spamtastically popular as her husband, whose name is targeted over three times more. SPAMfighter predicts that as we approach the President-Elect’s inauguration Obamaspam* will only increase.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” said SPAMfighter cofounder and CMO Martin Thorburg. “As the big inauguration day nears, it’s likely we’ll see an even bigger increase in Obama related spam. E-mail users can beat spammers to the punch, however they must be vigilant.
“E-mail users should get their Michelle Obama and celebrity gossip fix from trusted blogs and Web sites rather than risk opening unsolicited e-mails. By clicking on spam, users identify their e-mails as a working address and it is then sold off to more spammers resulting in even more spam. It’s important that we work together to help eliminate spam.”
