Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Blog Fodder - "What are some of the more bizarre bits of spam you have received, whether through emails or comments?"

Thanks to Raj over at Radioactive Jam for this weeks topic

What are some of the more bizarre bits of spam you have received, whether through emails or comments?


Well let me see I use Mailwasher Pro to clean my ISP based inbox out, my gmail, hotmail, yahoo all take care of themselves and I got checkers for them all so I know if I get new e-mail anyway.

Let me just grab some stats of the e-mail from the last 4 weeks...
Spam : 1416
Legitimate E-mail: 136
Spam e-mail is on processing bounced, deleted from my isp inbox, the e-mail address or domain (if I choose to add that) is added to my ever growing blacklist of junk e-mail.
Now since I got the Pro version I can report all of them but when I do I get a 2nd e-mail back telling me to click-a-link to finish reporting and it gives me an idea where the spam came from as well, I ONLY now do this for spam that "appears" to be from my subdomain i.e from me.
I've reported 29 pieces of e-mail this way I used to report them all but that gave me loads of work even using the tabbular functionality of Firefox it was a bind doing the find the report button using the text on the line below, clicking it, ctrl + tab to move tab, f3, repeat ad-nauseum.
Now as to what the spam contained..
If I replied to 1/10 I'd have a few million $$$'s in loans, enough "drugs" to keep me going for oh 10 years "solid" if you'll pardon the pun..
Software coming out of my ears, pump n dump stocks galore etc, etc...
I do have a personal website using my ISP provided webspace and I have a Guestbook there, which for some reason stopped e-mailing me when a new comment was added so I didn't know when comments were added I checked it one day and well hmmm 30 comments for "crap" were there all very similar as well, deleted and moderation turned ON.
when I had a Tag-board a while back I got SPAMMED on that as well :| so took it down got money back etc..
okay Im done I think..

2 comments:

Bill C said...

Wow. Ten-to-one spam over good emails? There's no way I'd be able to cherry-pick a few amusingly stupid ones with that kind of volume.

Somehow I must still be flying under the proverbial radar. In four weeks time I might see a couple hundred, probably less.

I wonder if how long you've had the most-spammed address(es) is a factor...

Gordon said...

Hi,

Well let me see how long have I had this e-mail address about 10 years and hmm it's only in the last 3 years that I've notice an massive increase.
I mean from like 300 or so in '04 to over 13,000 in '06 and that's only the reported stuff.
So yeah also it's how widely you place the e-mail address as well, i.e leave it very visable and it will get a bot crawl over it and snatch it and maybe start to get spammed with it.
Also when I got this email it was with 21 others, 1 was someone spamming using my address space, 20 were generalised spam I can read the headers and so of the text with the program I mentioned.

That make sense.