Mike “The Mouse“ House (a.k.a “D.J. Salinger”) was a rap artist who experienced only limited success, and a computer geek, when he decided to start selling CDs of open-source software. He turned to spamming to publicise his business, but realised that most of the spam messages he sent were blocked by E-mail filters. He decided to use the notorious obscured image spam, but since he had a few blind friends, he opted to also include an audio recording of a rap song with the message.
House received a few offers from his spam campaign, but his real break came when a few enthusiasts of the spam song shared it on the Internet, where it became an instant hit. The song eventually hit the charts and MTV, and made D.J. Salinger famous, who quickly released his first successful album called Rap to the spam, Ma’am!, with such highly acclaimed hits as “Rap to not get trapped” and “He ain’t Nigerian. He’s a Spammer!”.
As a millionaire, House decided to donate some of his money back to sponsoring open-source projects, and has donated 100,000s of U.S. Dollars to such causes as the Free Software Foundation, Linux International and SpamAssassin. “If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have made it big”, he said, and said he’s now working on a second album with a similar theme.
Author | Shlomi Fish |
Work | “Spam for Everyone” - The International Campaign for Accessible Spam |
Published | 2011-04-07 |