French Weather Reports and Martha Stewart Was Fat: A Brief Exploration in My Email Inbox

Chalk this up to the list of the many things I do not understand.

Over the past few months, spammers have started using creative fonts and emojis in their email subject lines. That would make one assume that they would stand out more on phones, but a cursory look today shows that isn't the case.

Let's look at this one first, because I'm an old man with nothing better to do, that's why:

This is a phone screenshot. Looking at it gets you the typical sea of question marks, maybe marking that my phone couldn't interpret the subject line. But then there's the weather-related gibberish below the question marks. That would make one think it's a weather report.

But this is what the same email looks like on my desktop:

Ah, a Sam's Club-related scam. Which indeed is what it is when I open the email.

Why the tomfoolery, I wonder? I guess to get us to open the emails. Which I did. But Sam's Club knows my name isn't Misterfweem. So, sayonara.

Here's another oddity:

What's going on here? Again, it's a mystery, particularly for those who don't speak French. I do speak French, but when I opened the email on my phone, I got a weight loss schpeil tangenitally related to Martha Stewart.

But on my desktop, it's a bit more straightforward:

But why make things appear inconsistent, device to device? I don't know. Maybe I'll see if there are studies on spam email on the ol' Internet.

Found this gobbledygook that says in some ways it might depend on the email client or the browser used. But since the browser on my phone doesn't render everything in French, there's probably more than that going on here.

This was only a cursory search using the term "why are spam emails inconsistent across devices," and I didn't find much. There's probably more out there. Or not. Just something odd to think about.