Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 15th October 2002

Scam the spammers

Here’s a fun new way to waste time on the internet: Scamming Nigerian spammers. This guy has a whole bunch of entertaining email exchanges with Nigerian scam artists, but the best has to be the Cthulu themed scam. Watch the Nigerian scam artists get slowly sucked in to a world of cults, demons and unspeakable horror.

Python e-mail features

Python 2.2.2 is out. It’s mostly bug fixes, but they have also included the latest version of the Python email package. I’ve been playing with Python’s email features recently as part of an experimental idea to import all of my mail (from various accounts) in to a mySQL database and build my own web mail / mail application program. Working with email in Python is beautfully simple, thanks to the aforementioned email package and the powerful pop3 and IMAP classes in the standard library.