Random Friday morning thoughts on SPAM. (Techies and others, feel free to chime in)

[ntrprnr 0]

I couldn't sleep, so was going through my junk folder for false positives - 34.87 megabytes of SPAM since one week ago Friday. Just thinking about that multiplied by everyone on the Internet scares the hell out of me when I think about bandwidth.

So I don't.

What I do think about though, is this - and tell me if I'm odd...

SPAM that's spelled incorrectly or has grammatical errors bothers me more than SPAM that doesn't.

For instance:

"She wants a better sex? All you need's here."

It hurt me to type that ."a better sex" is incorrect. All you need IS here. You can't conjoin the words "needs" and "is" with an apostrophe.

Another one that drives me BATTY, is "Our store is your cureall."

Do you know it took me over six months before I figured out that they were not trying to spell Cereal, but rather "CURE ALL"

I imagine some guy in Russia/Kazakhstan/Algeria/wherever who read a book on English and composed from there. Same with the Nigerian scams: "This letter I pray finds you safe with much health." Yeah. "How you doing today, Bob?" "Oh, pretty much health, I pray about you, Jim?"

Insanity. Any others that drive you bonkers? I'm amazed how well, by the way, Panix is doing in not catching false-positives. In over 150 megabytes of SPAM over the last month or six weeks, I've found three that it incorrectly tagged - and they were all from a mailing list on Yahoo. (which has since been fixed.)

Does anyone wonder if they didn't get SPAM at all, how much their email would drop in usage, and whether or not there'd be some kind of psychological implication of all of a sudden not having your Blackberry go off every 45 seconds, but rather, every 10 or 15 minutes or so? Deep down, without really realizing it, would we feel less loved?

Also, has anyone noticed that we've simply "adapted" into understanding what a SPAM email looks like just from the sender and subject line put together, and 99.9% of the time, we're totally right? We adapted to that - almost subconsciously. The same when how when I was seven, and my parents would be introduced to someone, if it ever came up that we went to the same Temple, or that person was invited for a holiday dinner, I'd ask how my parents knew he was Jewish. "Oh, you'll just know," they said. And eventually, I did. Same thing with SPAM. I don't know "Joseph S Davis," but I can bet that no one I DO want to know would send me a message that says "PERFECT FOR CHRISTMAS."
I also don't know Tissue E. Tidings, but I've adapted to know that there does not lie a real name, regardless of the subject line. It's interesting from a human nature/brain standpoint how we've managed to figure that out, huh?

Finally, I got a "receive your Sony Playstation 3" SPAM email today. Usual garbage, sign up for seven credit cards, six home loans, etc. My question is - since they're so hard to get now, what if I did everything and they couldn't deliver? Could I sue for false advertising?

Finally finally: I must have, several years ago, signed up for something and used the name "SHANK PETER" - Because to this day, a good third of my SPAM is subject lined with that.

Also - I get ads for mortgages in Farmingdale, NY. I've never lived there. Just in case you were wondering. And I get a lot of them, too. Yet I've still never lived there. I'm sure of it. Of course, a few years ago, I never lived in Florida, either, but that didn't stop someone from opening up a phone in my name and then going delinquent on it. Oh, happy day, to get THAT letter in the mail - "Hi. We're suing you over a phone bill you never paid when you lived in Florida." "Um... OK..."

Happy Friday,
-Peter

PS: It's not post-whoring if it's a legitimate question, or actual ramble, right?

_______________
"Why'd you track away at 7,000 feet?"
"Even in freefall, I have commitment issues."

[antifnsocial 0]

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IPS: It's not post-whoring if it's a legitimate question, or actual ramble, right?

No techie, it's called a Blog. I thought you actually had a sizeable one somewhere else?

Please feel free to reply to my posts and pm's, but only if you're smart enough to understand what they really mean.

[ntrprnr 0]

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IPS: It's not post-whoring if it's a legitimate question, or actual ramble, right?

No techie, it's called a Blog. I thought you actually had a sizeable one somewhere else?

Actually, after I posted it here, I realized it would be a good blog post, as well.

But I'm more just curious about opinions... I know there are hardcore talented techies on this forum.

_______________
"Why'd you track away at 7,000 feet?"
"Even in freefall, I have commitment issues."

[PhreeZone 20]

You are right. The VAST majority of Spam is being wrote by non-english speakers and are using translation tools to convert it to english. The latest round of "Pump and Dump" spams that came out last week was traced back to a Russian hacking group: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060235,00.asp They have a 70,000 node spamming network set up that they rent out to anyone that pays the price they want.

One of the other techniques that is hot right now is called "Island Hopping". Its where phishers are registering domain names that instead of being .com are instead .cc or .at or any other extention. ICANN allows each country to have its own unique 2 letter domain address and these spammers are buying all sorts of obscure domains since a lot of spam filters were originally set to only look at 3 letter extentions for phishing and other things and would ignore it if it was only 2 letter long.

I'm bringing a new SPAM appliance on line today hopefully here and I'm waiting to see how much it improves the spam coming to my personal email. On my business email I am yet to see a Spam in the last 2 years and it uses the same technolgy so I'm hopeful it will work out

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[kbordson 8]

I was hoping you meant the food.... or kinda food.... or brownish meatlike substance in a can....