If you lie down with dogs...
If you respond to this kind of ad, you deserve the spam you'll get as a result:
COLLEGE GURL WANTING TO MEET MATURE MAN TONITE!!Lonely horny sex-deprived girl looking for sex - w4m - 19
Meet me tonight!Cum to my area - w4m - 25
Yeah, yeah, those are all yawners, right? After all, you, my readers, are too bright to fall for those obvious ones.
But, of course, the spammers improve their odds when they get even just a little smarter:
NSA kinky fun today - w4m - 26looking for a man to take care of me - w4m - 23
The clues here are:
In the first case, "today" -- while I don't want to say that women are never in that much of a rush, I will say that if you think real women on CL are rare, imagine an order of magnitude more rare still and you might be close to the numbers of women who are in a big rush to get some right away.
In the second case, "take care of me" -- this says prostitute to me. It appeals to the daddy types and the guys who like to be protective of their (even temporary) possessions.
But, in both cases, what really stands out to me, but only because I browse several cities CE sections in a bunch, is that every last one of these ads showed up in multiple cities. Of course, this sucks for the average user, who isn't going to think to look at Chicago and Boston if he's living in Seattle.
Needless to say, this sort of thing bums me out because a) spam sucks and b) who needs more reasons than a)? and c) this keeps the CL CE economy in terrible shape for both men and the few real women there are. There often are clues as to whether an ad is real or fake, but not always, and you have to be paying a lot of attention, which, if you're doing a quick skim after work, you may not be doing. My only advice, in those cases, is to use a throwaway email address that you can recycle after it gets too clogged with spam.
Comments
I pretty much always use throwaway email addresses on CL. One easy way to get one is to post a CL ad of your own, and use the reply address. Sure, it'll only work for a limited time, but if you get a good conversation going with someone you can give ther another address. It also means if the person you're writing to is clever, they'll be able to easily find and read your ad - which I think is a plus.
Posted by: Cos | February 6, 2006 12:37 AM
Note to self: As administrator of my own email server, I have some potential interesting advantages on this front. Hmm. *grin*
Posted by: GreyDuck | February 9, 2006 1:34 PM
Hey, sometimes as a man, I even get spam in response to my ads! "I'll give you something special and make it worth the wait if you reply to me..." And then when you reply, you get an ad for a porn site that you can join "100% for free!" Arg. This is annoying when it's the only response I get that's not from a gay man with a cock shot attached. (Hey, I said "m4w," can you not READ? If I wanted a gay man, I would have wrote "m4m.") Spam! In a response! Though I suppose this sort of thing is to be expected. At least I don't fall for it anymore, but I'm still a lonely guy up against horrible odds.
Nearly every ad I've responded to has been an autoresponder. I know there are real women there, though -- the only time I didn't get an autoresponder, I ended up having a "don't get discouraged" conversation with someone more than 20 years my senior (I said she was too old for my tastes -- there was no age in the ad). Unfortunately they are few and far between.
I don't know what's worse, being a woman on CL/CE and having to wade through 150+ assinine responses to an ad, or being a man on CL/CE and having to detect the one real woman out of 150+ autoresponders. Over time, I've learned which kinds of ads are autoresponders, but still.
Posted by: aml | March 31, 2006 8:48 AM