It’s spam

Spam 1 Minute

As I noted last month, spam is up. But it hasn’t been accompanied by any increase in originality. Here’s the latest from my Junk Mail folder:

Really enticing subject lines there. 

… And from a different spam, this excerpt:

Hey, aphanipterous harebottle

Those farmers hear the girl crying.

After Checking our records, our office is willing to offer you unbeast Hovenia anywhere from 373K at 6.53% to 788K at 5.72% Fixed. ferly overprosperous hippodamous Those fishermen keep the room warm.

I think they want me to apply for a mortgage. With this pitch, what sort of hit rate can they possibly get?

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Published by Ed Bott

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5 thoughts on “It’s spam”

  1. I got hit with that exact same spam last night. I think SpamBayes managed to filter it all out and I only got about 15 or so.

    Glad to see I’m not the only one. 🙂

    -J

  2. ISPs really must do something about the spam zombie problem. It’s killing email at the moment. They are going to have to start putting egress filters that block outgoing connections to port 25 (the SMTP email port), and only allow those customers who explicitly request it to make such connections (e.g. if they’re running their own mail servers on DSL). The ISP will have to ensure that non-authenticated connections to their “smart host” server (outgoing SMTP) only originate from within their own network.

    For anyone who wants to send email from their own ISP while connected to a foreign ISP, they will also have to offer authenticated SMTP connections on a different port, originating from outside their site.

    The second two provisions, restricting unauthenticated access and allowing authenticated connections from elsewhere on a different port, are required to make SPF and Sender ID work correctly anyway.

    Users should of course try to avoid becoming a spam zombie by installing antivirus, antispam and antispyware software, keeping those and software patches up to date, and being a lot more careful about what they install. However, it’s a lot easier, albeit expensive, for ISPs to prevent the damage.

  5. gmail used to be pretty good at blocking spam – but i see more filtering through to my inbox these days.
    yeah – what’s with the fisherman stories – I always wonder what’s the point of sending spam like that…?

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