1 Iki Piki: {checking his e-mail} Oh man! I hate it when spam has a semi-random subject line and sentences at the beginning to fool spam filters.
2 Iki Piki: It's impossible to tell easily that it's not from a real person.
3 Iki Piki: The best ones almost read as though they were written by an intelligent being. It's a growing catastrophe!
4 Spanners: The real tragedy is that the first few truly self-aware Net entities were deleted as spam bots before anyone realised.

Die, spammers, die!

Spam really sucks. Thankfully I have a good spam filter and don't experience this problem myself.

I also wanted to say that the last two speech balloons were real buggers. I just couldn't break the text in a way that fitted snugly into the balloon shape like I usually manage. This happens now and then, of course, but to have two such nasty examples in a row is rare. Thankfully.

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2013-07-26 Rerun commentary: I think spam filters must have gotten significantly better in the years since this comic was written. I actually no longer think of spam as a real problem. I occasionally get the odd message evading my filters, but it's rare enough nowadays that I hardly even notice or think about spam any more.

I'm sure there's still tons of it out there, using up network resources like nobody's business, which is the real problem. It just seems much easier to avoid seeing it these days.

I guess in the future maybe the spammers have regained some ground again, and can even target ships in space.