MAKE MILLIONS OR BILLIONS in less than three years in business utilizing new technologies! We provide capital. Biggest money-maker out there! Receive assistance from established men. Write P. Graham, Y-Combinator Inc., Mountain-View Station Southern Pacific Railway, Santa Clara County Calif.
Small difference, with a startup there are no promises, just very strong hinting and wagging eyebrows in a general direction of something almost not vague.
Cut / paste those into spam emails today and nothing has changed other than the dollar figures and the method of delivery. Sadly someone will always prey on the gullible and that in itself is a timeless method of getting rich.
It's all there, free initial offer for lead gen (ebook), money back guarantee, obnoxious copy, the only thing missing is the call to action "Yes!, I want to earn $100 per week, please send me your $150 ebook for just $25"
So, that's the source of all those spam emails. I was wondering where they got their inspiration, it also explains some of the more peculiar turns of phrase that keep popping up ('honorable sir' and 'compliments of the season').
If you wanted to train a spam filter you could do a lot worse than to use these as your corpus.
Check out the article on p. 476 ("Wireless of the Future"). There are some great quotes and very accurate given that they are from 1909. "It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world ..."
Seeing these ads, I'm genuinely curious, did we manage in the course of a hundred years to go from "we sell the product to you" into "you come to us to buy the product"?
