After I posted a blog entry last week (1/28/2009) on Valentine’s Day spam subject lines, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at specific words related to Valentine’s Day that have been appearing in spam subject lines recently to see if there were any trends. I had previously noted an increase in the appearance of a few Valentine’s Day related words; “cupid,” “Feb 14,” and “February 14,” and I wanted to expand the search a bit. I was hoping to try and redeem the reputation of Valentine’s Day spam since my previous post put the spammer’s intentions in a less romantic light than the holiday warrants. I decided to search for traditional Valentine phrases such as the following: chocolate, cupid, Feb 14, February 14, flowers, heart, jewelry, Valentine, and Valentine’s Day. As expected, coming out of the end of year holiday stretch there are some words considered to be “Valentine-like” that appear more in December than January/February. The phrases and words whose appearances are on the way down as we pull away from the end of year holidays include chocolate, heart, and jewelry.
There are also some obvious phrases and words specific to the Valentine’s Day holiday that are on the increase as we head into the countdown to the auspicious day. The phrases and words whose stock is going up as we approach Valentine’s Day are: cupid, Valentine, Valentine’s Day, Feb 14, and February 14. “Valentine” is definitely the word of choice. There was one word that had a high appearance rate in December and saw a sharp drop off after the New Year’s holiday season, but has started to appear more frequently again. And, that word is flowers. Spam with the word “flowers” in the subject line rose sharply at the beginning of December and then almost disappeared by January 1. With the holiday of love looming on the horizon, we’re once again seeing flower spam bloom.