I received this spam email a few days ago. The subject line caught me first: “Cleanse and Flush up to 20lbs from your colon!” The rest of the email reads like this:

Lose Weight With Your Mate! – Flush out up to 25 pounds – Remove Deadly Toxic Buildup – Relieve Constipation and Bloating – Best of all, you can try it FREE!* Get Your FREE Bottle and Colon Health Kit Today! http://z12.e-booksmarts.com/r/777/3448727/830.htm *Plus S&H Unsubscribe: http://z12.e-booksmarts.com/r/777/3448727/831.htm ColonMed700 3600 Oceanview, Glendale CA 91208

Here are the things that really jump out at me from this spam message:

1. Of course, it was unsolicited, which is what makes it spam. But it’s so far from anything I might have wanted to know about that it’s not even remotely linked to my buying preferences and interests. I can’t imagine a moment in which I might want to read about colon cleaners in my email, and yet, here it is.

2. “Lose weight with your mate” – What does this have to do with anything? Does my mate have to be a part of this cleansing process? What if I’m mate-free? This phrase is probably there for the rhyming catchiness and for the fact that everyone likes to do things with their mates (although hawking a colon-cleaning product as a bonding benefit for couples might not work the way they expect).

3. “Flush out up to 25 pounds” – I get the charming “flush” reference, but 25 pounds?? I suspect that my entire intestinal weight is less than that, let alone what’s in my system. So now I have a healthy fear of this product, since I’m pretty sure most of my internal organs would have to be removed in order to reach that touted 25-pound weight loss. Truth in advertising? I certainly hope not.

4. “Remove deadly toxic buildup” – There are deadly toxins building up in my body?? Maybe so, but I doubt a laxative will fix that. The use of “deadly,” however, is a classic scare tactic to motivate buyers. Too bad the spammers probably lost most readers before they even reached that line, thanks to number 5…

5. The text above is the entire contents of the spam message. It has no graphics, no fonts, no testimonials, and no more information about the product. It’s so small and plain that it breaks almost every rule of visual marketing. As a means of sucking people in, this falls very short. After all, even if I hadn’t been in the market for a colon cleaner, a snazzy message with bright colors and happy customers might have intrigued me. In theory, anyway.

6. FREE – They mention “free” twice, in big letters. Really, they claim, it’s free! Except for that tiny asterisk that notes the added, undisclosed cost of shipping and handling. They also say you can “try it” free, not just get it free; in most cases, “try it free” means “you get a short trial period until we start charging your credit card for the astronomical recurring costs of this product,” at which point you end up frustrated and trying to cancel the charges before they add up. In just about every case, “FREE” isn’t free at all, but spammers love to use it.

7. The date – What you can’t see in the text alone is that the email was date-stamped on 1/18/2037. Since that’s in the future, the email will stay on the top of the inbox as long as the user doesn’t delete it, keeping the lovely colon-cleansing ad front and center for as long as possible. Lots of spammers mess with the dates on emails in order to manipulate where they end up in the inbox. Some take the opposite tactic and put a much older date on the email, making the new message appear at the bottom of the list so that the user has to hunt for it in order to delete it.

8. The small bit of good news: The spam does include an unsubscribe link and an address for the company, and while either or both of those might be bogus, it’s a nice touch that almost makes it appear that the marketing company would rather not send you colon cleaning ads if you don’t want them.

So for this spam ad’s unsolicited nature, random content, dishonest advertising, manipulation of the calendar and unappealing design, it officially becomes part of the Marketing Hall of Shame! Congratulations! Sort of.