The message staring out at me from my Gmail inbox said I’d received an update on my previous conversation with a sender named “vaishali”. The “(3)” next to the sender’s name suggested that I had responded to this person before, although I didn’t recognize the name. I clicked anyhow.
Alas, the message was spam for some company that I won’t mention here. As it happens, Gmail assigned the (3) to the message suggesting a threaded conversation because the sender had sent the same missive three times in a row. I have no way of knowing whether this was some clever new scheme by the spammer or merely an accident, but it certainly seems like an effective way of tricking people into clicking on an e-mail that they might normally just delete.
