The Problem With Spam
I know there is no point to discussing how much I hate getting spam in my mailbox. I think we all hate it, both the electronic version and the physical version. But its interesting to me how spam seems to be getting dumber and dumber. Not counting the rude stuff and the number of people in Africa that need help releasing millions of dollars of money tied up in estate, I'm getting more and more stuff like this:
The latest tricks to throw off spam checkers can be found here. -SPAN- tags insert invisible random letters (tags removed in example), mis-spellings, and poor grammar which is (I think) an attempt to throw off the various spam checkers deployed. This message found its way through our corporate spam filter showing that these tricks current work, although the spam filter gets adjusted frequently as needed.
I found myself wondering how effective these messages are? If I wanted to refinance my home, would I really do it through an anonymous, poorly worded message from overseas?
Obviously, there is a revenue stream for the senders of messages like this. It's been going on for so long that this would have stopped if there wasn't money to be made. So, the problem with spam is that some people actually become customers from these messages. Some minscule fraction of the population is making the rest of us plow through this junk, spend time setting up filters for it, and take up bandwidth we pay for.
At least with the post office you can get a PO box and stop all the junk mail. But there is no centralized way to get rid of its electronic counterparts at this point.
Some things that help:
- Try an Email program with better spam filtering. Thunderbird is a good choice, and reads my corporate Microsoft Exchange server also. There are probably lots of others besides Outlook.
- Plain text works great for Email still. Less bandwidth, and less chances of hidden characters and other HTML dirty tricks.
- Use junk Email accounts for people you don't care about. I have lskywalker@hotmail.com which is my throw-away account. I know there is nothing real coming in here and can usually "select-all-delete".
Thu, 26 Aug 2004 04:05:10 -0500
Dear Sir:
I hope you enjoined the last morfctgage lokhan you got from our company.
We strongly recommend to redy finance at 3.4 % rpvate and decrease your
monthly payment, please check details below and click the necessary
link. xhaorlg borpmkjmg hlwftqjn - hkioedrc wzragotj lfsrsko
Please note since you are our previous client, you are already
apwcproved and it will take less paper work to apply:
Please visit this link to apply online. Please enter your Personal Secure Code 7909
on the secure site.
Thank you.
Burt
Personal Broker Group
The latest tricks to throw off spam checkers can be found here. -SPAN- tags insert invisible random letters (tags removed in example), mis-spellings, and poor grammar which is (I think) an attempt to throw off the various spam checkers deployed. This message found its way through our corporate spam filter showing that these tricks current work, although the spam filter gets adjusted frequently as needed.
I found myself wondering how effective these messages are? If I wanted to refinance my home, would I really do it through an anonymous, poorly worded message from overseas?
Obviously, there is a revenue stream for the senders of messages like this. It's been going on for so long that this would have stopped if there wasn't money to be made. So, the problem with spam is that some people actually become customers from these messages. Some minscule fraction of the population is making the rest of us plow through this junk, spend time setting up filters for it, and take up bandwidth we pay for.
At least with the post office you can get a PO box and stop all the junk mail. But there is no centralized way to get rid of its electronic counterparts at this point.
Some things that help:
- Try an Email program with better spam filtering. Thunderbird is a good choice, and reads my corporate Microsoft Exchange server also. There are probably lots of others besides Outlook.
- Plain text works great for Email still. Less bandwidth, and less chances of hidden characters and other HTML dirty tricks.
- Use junk Email accounts for people you don't care about. I have lskywalker@hotmail.com which is my throw-away account. I know there is nothing real coming in here and can usually "select-all-delete".
posted by Lyle @ 11:22 AM
