I get about 50 pieces of spam a day. That may not be as much as some folks see, but it’s definitely enough for me. At one point in time though, I can remember when I didn’t get any spam at all. It was then that I signed up for a newsletter from a discount travel dealer called Travelzoo (they were featured in a cnn.com article).

See, back in 1998, during my first Engineering workterm, I actually signed up for spam. I know, it is not spam if you ask for it, but I was signing up for a weekly specials list for travel that was not available in my area, so I consider it spam. The reason I signed up for it was the company was offering shares for giving them your email address. This was before the dot-bust, so I figured what the hell, I might make something for it. Well, then the 2000-2001 rolled around, the company hadn’t gone public, and most dot-coms were dying, so I kinda forgot about the whole thing.

By that time though, I was getting lots of spam, and their mailing blended in, so I didn’t cancel it. Last summer, while checking my spam box to make sure I wasn’t deleting real mail, I saw one of their top 10 lists. I decide to check out the company, and found they had gone public and were trading for about $6/share. Nothing to get exited about since I only had 6 shares, but I figure I would add them to my messenger stock watch list. We’ll late last year, the stock started to climb, and I decide to sell. In the end, I was able to sell the stock for a few hundred dollars. Granted, this is not quite like winning the lotto, but from now on I’ll look at weirder marketing campaigns with a different light.