What do the following names have in common?

[Robert Charlton]

What do the following names have in common?...

Ferdinand Balser, Tallulah Bastarache, Johnny Beffert, Valerie Burkepile, Clayton Chandra, Cory Chavers, Talia Coats, Hall Deslauriers, Aubrey Tulley.

I'm going out right now because it's New Years Day and it's not raining, but I will return to comment on answers.

[Shakil]

I know the answer:

The common thing is: I know NONE of them!

Shak

(whats the prize, not another STATIC Google blanket)

[cornwall]

With names like that, they must all be American!

[JonB]

they are all not important people! at least google says so ;)

[jimbeetle]

>>With names like that, they must all be American!

Sounds to me like they're straight out of the London telephone directory. Dicken's London (if he had had a phone).

[lawman]

Uh-oh. Is an international incident about to erupt.

lawman

[JonB]

Tallulah sounds jamaican!

[buckworks]

My guess: They're fake names that you've received spam from.

[diggle]

I would hazard a guess they are all pseudonyms that the great WC Fields opened bank accounts under...

[jimbeetle]

>>They're fake names that you've received spam from.

Sounds like buckworks might have it.

Looking at my deleted e-mail folder for today I find such names as: Cassaundra Culbreth, Lancelot Beitinjaneh, Geoffrey Decaire (wan't he in Nicholas Nickelby?), Clare Bakhach and Betty Jane Howell (now that 'merican!).

[Robert Charlton]

>>They're fake names that you've received spam from.<<

buckworks has it! I was really intrigued by several responses, which kind of confirm my thoughts that whoever puts these names together either...

a) doesn't have an ear for contemporary American names...
b) or else does have an ear for these and is cynical enough about the whole enterprise to be amused by these choices.

>>Sounds to me like they're straight out of the London telephone directory<<

This is a thought I had, at least about some of them... and Dickens had come to mind as well. I love the WC Fields suggestion. It occurs that Fields came out of a British music hall tradition, so the British quality of these names would be consistent with that.

I'm wondering, because these names are all so similar... and jimbeetle's list includes more of the same... whether there might be one company behind this set of mailings (and there are a lot of them).

No way to filter these out, unfortunately... and a lot of the ID strings seem to defy pattern matching as well... stuff like xwqdk, vwkgv, quvhfpvq. Anyway, jimbeetle (and maybe buckworks) and I are on the same list.

[Shakil]

Anyway, jimbeetle (and maybe buckworks) and I are on the same list.
===============================================

You sure that the 3 of you are NOT the same Person :)

Shak

[edited by: lawman at 3:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2003]
[edit reason] Correct Side Scroll [/edit]

[buckworks]

One pattern that's useful to filter for is multiple empty spaces (say at least four or five) in the Subject line. It's common for spam to have a bunch of empty spaces in the Subject line then some gibberish at the end. I wouldn't use this to auto-delete anything, but messages with multiple spaces are good candidates for the "Probably Spam" folder.