How weird is this? I was following up links to stories about spam, checked the author bio on this blog, and DH says “Oh, that’s a friend of Steve’s. She has the same kind of digital camera.”
The common link? They’re both moderators (at least, I think Steve is also a moderator) at DSLreports DH participates there a bit as well.
Anyway, weird coincidence, and spam sucks. Read on…
My own personal spam filters are kind of a hack job hybrid. I use AOL Communicator for incoming mail to my AOL account and also to the account I think of as my “back line” for when I’m finally ready to make the break with my trusty old AOL persona. AOL Communicator has what I call “spam filters for dummies.” It has a big friendly button labeled “This is spam.” According to DH, it’s really just an AOL-themed version of Mozilla or Thunderbird. It seems to cut down on the amount of spam to the AOL account by about 85%, based on what I see if I happen to log on to AOL using their “real” version 8.0 software. It goes from a tiny trickle to a huge gushing flood. So I’m pretty happy to just not use “real” AOL anymore, not even to chat. Communicator has email, AIM, a couple of other features that seem like filler, and a really nifty Internet radio tuner.
There are additional filters on the “back line” account, so I get very little spam on that one unless I happen to access it via webmail. But unfortunately the filters can’t seem to capture that little man in the white coat whose picture appears with a lot of pretty little blue pills. He sure gets around.
And yes, the subject lines for him are constantly shifting. Currently, the subjects seem to be random stings of words that evoke a distant, dreamy state of mind in the email user. I suspect that the spammers have heard about the trend by spammees to turn the subject lines of their spam into found-text poetry, and they’re deliberately making their subject lines poetry fodder, thus enticing would-be poets to at least let the spam hit their inbox. Grr. Evil.
Every now and then an article about a successful (shudder) spammer shows up in the regular press. It really irks me that the folks that bring you 600 ways to spell Viagra are not living in broken down trailers in the hick sticks… they’re living in quite nice houses. Like that Ralsky dude (the best link leads to a subscription-required article at the New York Times, or to an expired story at CNET)
However, now and then the good guys win one – in the case of spam faxes, Fax.com will be paying the price at last.
And wandering around just now on a tangent, I ran across several sites discussing the evil robots and how to trap them, and once you have them where you want them, mock them.
We shall see if the in-house ace programmer, self-taught Linux geek, and damn fine hubby will be able to figure out if any of these anti-spambot techniques are needed. I keep noticing some rather odd behavior by various spiders and have started wondering about spam harvesting and comment-spamming.