In the last few days, on top of the usual couple of dozen pieces of spam, I've started getting messages with titles like, "UPS Ship Notification, Tracking Number : ABC123XYZ". Made me look, once—the text version is filled with quotes from the likes of Walter Lippman and Groucho Marx. That's presumably just the Bayesian spam-filter spoof text, but I don't read HTML mail, so who knows what the actual product is.
It seems more and more to me that spammers are competing to see who can send a message that violates as many Gricean Maxims at once as egregiously as possible. I think this one may have hit them all. Let's see: it manages to violate both Maxims of Quantity at the same time, since it's simultaneously not informative at all and more (irrelevant quotation) information than necessary. It violates both Maxims of Quality, since there was no UPS delivery and, obviously, they had no evidence to support asserting that there was. It violates the Maxim of Relevance by being completely irrelevant—that's pretty much the definition of spam. And I believe it violates all four Maxims of Order: it's obscure, it's ambiguous, it's unnecessarily wordy, and it's been rudely stuffed into my inbox, which is pretty disorderly. Looks like a home run.
As long as I'm venting, I'd like to mention that I'm not interested in diet aids, working at home, free advertising, stock tips, any kind of enlargement, cheap software, Xa.nax, or Val|um. Or a Rolex. Or playing the dupe in a Nigerian production of the Spanish Prisoner. Or, and I think this should go without saying, a drug for erectile dysfunction that comes in "soft tabs".
It's probably finally time to retire my current email address, which must be in every spammer's database (I've had it since 1996, and I used it to post to Usenet many times), and switch over to Gmail.
Rule number one: Spammers violate the maxims of quality. [http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html]
Apart from that, I'm not sure how to evaluate spam against some of the other maxims, given that spam is by definition an unwanted communication rather than part of a coöperative exchange. As you point out, this means that any spam necessarily violates the maxim of relation. And what would it take for a piece of spam to be "as informative as necessary"? Would they have to say things like "We intend to steal your credit card information"?
Posted by: Q. Pheevr | January 07, 2005 at 11:56 AM