Geoffrey K. Pullum marks up a distinctly clumsy Nigerian scam e-mail message.
Strange though it may seem, the scammer’s best interests are served if the email doing the phishing is ludicrously incompetent and transparently suspicious. He isn’t after you or me; he’s after the poor, lonely, gullible, housebound pensioner next door, the rare uninformed shut-in who has never heard of Nigerian scams and for whom the dream of a windfall will be attractive enough to justify handing over a bank account authorization password.