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Spam 'From:'—Hi George, or it is Alysa?
A little while ago, I started to promote my company's new product: Turn Watcher (an Initiative Tracker for Game Masters). With it, I got a huge increase of spam. It was increasing anyway, but that got to the level of close to 100 totally useless emails a day filling over 1Mb of my mailbox in no time!
So I decided to create a spam filter. It works great and I have about 100 emails block per day. One very important point of my filter: it doesn't check the origins (i.e. the From: parameter) of the emails. This is not only not reliable, it's actually common people with valid emails who have nothing to do with spam who get their email hacked (talk to me of identity theft!) Well... okay! Not all of them are since many will just automatically be generated and thus will not event correspond to real people.
This is what brings me here. I'm a software engineer and I really have a hard time to understand how the people writing these software think. I suppose it works, but looking at the list below (last night & this morning emails blocked: 45 of them already!), what I see is a name and and email address which have nothing in common. Vance Cope has an email saying alycia... Hugh has his email saying william... cowboyw84 has an email you cannot read... and some japanese are also spamming me. I do not read japanese so I just reject all of these emails.
For some reasons, the increase of spam in the last about two months is phenomenal. I can see that on my Yahoo! account. It also gets over 100 emails of spam every day, and not just porn. It includes loads of:
- Mortgage (watch out, never give your bank account info to anyone over the Internet!!!),
- Invest in stock of totally unknown compagnies (pink market mainly it seems),
- Buy medical for better sex,
- Buy brand watches for next to nothing,
- Get free Apple, Palm, Dell, Compaq computers,
- Get free make up samples,
- Always in English: you won the lottery that you never entered in whatever country the guy fills like on that day (Switzerland, Germany, France... you name it!)
- Hoodia 920+ to lose weight,
- US $888 to play at Casino blah,
- Get your perfect company logo (since I receive that one I must have 1 million logos already!),
- OEM Software, get MS-Windows for US $20, etc.
| "Letha Nelson" | <awfi@example.com> |
| "Vance Cope" | <alycia@example.com> |
| "Petra Askew" | <abc02002@example.com> |
| "froefwsj xjhguzy" | <pzwweiqu@example.com> |
| "Marcy Singleton" | <4p6ch8cCoe@example.com> |
| "Hugh" | <william@example.com> |
| "Megan Foote" | <away@example.com> |
| =?iso-2022-jp?B?cmll?= | <coffeeblendyoishii@example.com> |
| "Gilbert" | <john@example.com> |
| "Graciela Whalen" | <an@example.com> |
| =?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCNS5KfSQsQSokUCRsJF4kNyQ/ISobKEI=?= | <polaster_hokuto@example.com> |
| "Ana Aldrich" | <7CGsff8CX@example.com> |
| "Delores Masters" | <3Dgbgcgeq@example.com> |
| "bpierre" | <mfbdbwwfxrm@example.com> |
| "Marshall Fernandez" | <6kbg5Dk8Xn@example.com> |
| "waring michel" | <ewardhamlin@example.com> |
| "cordy lake" | <bonniephipps@example.com> |
| "cowboyw84" | <zmfmuubriyl@example.com> |
| "nlmddsue" | <whavelovaug@example.com> |
| =?gb2312?B?icKIpIKijnGCxoNHg2KDYIFj?= | <goij003@example.com> |
| "Elliott Doty" | <HueyEchols@example.com> |
| "PZOCH70084" | <yxhwakognxy@example.com> |
| "Shameka Saturnina" | <umzmg0ttt@example.com> |
| "Jarrod Price" | <3bntGke1nC@example.com> |
| "Young" | <anderlujtpd@example.com> |
| =?gb2312?B?aW5mb3JtYXRpb24=?= | <toij6565@example.com> |
| "Ethan Yoder" | <alex@example.com> |
| Maryellen Mayberry | <ilebronygep@example.com> |
| "Matti Daly" | <LoydCorrea@example.com> |
| "Eric Baker" | <i9fici0mme@example.com> |
| "Alexander" | <geoffrey@example.com> |
| "Tucker Coleman" | <pl@example.com> |
| =?iso-2022-jp?B?U0RG?= | <sfd@example.com> |
| "Twila Dennison" | <av1@example.com> |
| "Alvin Rudolph" | <almond@example.com> |
| "Paola Keller" | <NathanDavidson@example.com> |
| "Catherine" | <info@example.com> |
| "Henry" | <gilbert@example.com> |
| "Omar Nelson" | <prevdrogas@example.com> |
| "Thomas" | <gilbert@example.com> |
| "Rod Scruggs" | <adrki@example.com> |
| "Nicholas" | <stephen@example.com> |
| "Bryon Nichols" | <27ocemdmd@example.com> |
| "Boyd Caudill" | <8ck4smsGeq@example.com> |
| "Dexter Mcdonald" | <bairoberty@example.com> |
Here I got another one. All in one single night as you can see, Mon Jan 18. So?! Who do you think I should call for my next mortgage? Fairbank? Primerica? Ho! Wait actually, the date is 2038. Okay so I'll have to wait for 32 years first.
As for my mailbox, I now receive about 200 emails (which are blocked by my filter) a day. Lucky me because otherwise I'd go crazy. I really wonder why the Internet Providers don't try to do something in that regard. I'd understand why it would become a "you have to pay to access the Internet" system with such morons as these spammers. And frankly I pay for my connection and it is sad that I have to spend so much time on these spam emails.
