What are the markers of spam emails?

And why can’t the senders avoid them?  You don’t need top-tier GPT-3 to sidestep these errors:

“touch base with you”

“urgent”

“immediate reply requested”

They are all dead giveaways that I should delete the message without reading further.  And why does the top of the email have to look so institutional in its formatting?  And please note — these are not all scams.  Many are actual marketing pitches directed at me.

Maybe worst of all is mentioning that I haven’t responded to the last email sent, as if that would make me feel guilty or something.  Treat me like a rational Bayesian!

“still haven’t heard back from you”

“still awaiting a response”

And so on.  You will continue to wait. This one I received is a lie, but at least based on a certain amount of cleverness:

“You’ve been responsive to press releases we’ve issued in the past around government and cybersecurity”

What else do you all take to be very clear predictors that an email is spam or just a marketing pitch?  And what is your model for why spam emails are not more convincing than they are?

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