Sometimes, a piece of spam comes through that seems to have been specially designed to catch my attention, almost as if the Evil Spammers have been spying on me or researching my interests. For example, I had one come through this morning from "Tammy Pierce" - one of my all-time favorite authors - but it turned out not to have been sent to me directly; rather to a generic address which ends up in my mailbox. Still, this sort of thing is enough to make a geek paranoid...
Hi. I've received a large volume of complaints from yourself this morning mis-addressed to postmaster@[domain].com. Whilst an address at [domain].net is listed as registrant for the spamvertised domain, the .com and .net domains are unrelated.
A word of advice: it's unlikely that the spammers themselves will remove you from their lists or take any kind of action no matter what volume of complaints they receive. On the other hand, if your complaints do reach people who are willing and able to deal with spam problems, filling their mailboxes with megabytes of spammed or misdirected complaints is perhaps not the best way to get their assistance. A single, polite message would be much more effective.
And believe me, those of us who work in the technical departments of reputable internet companies want to get rid of the spam problem even more than our end users do - dealing with it costs us a vast amount of time, money and aggravation. For example, my spam filters only block out around 95% of the ten thousand or so junk messages I receive daily, and I had to drop everything else for the latter half of this week to deal with a series of spam attacks against our email servers.
Unfortunately, spam is a fact of life on the Internet at present, and the only thing that will stop it is a concerted world-wide technological and legal effort. If you really want to help in the fight, the best thing you can do is lobby your political representatives for tough restrictions on junk email, and harsher penalties for offenders.
Today's most amusing spam (spammer's name and email addresses changed to protect the guilty, the rest is exactly as is):
From: Spammer Name <spammer@spam.com>
To: Postmaster <postmaster@example.com>
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 14:19:08 -0100
Subject: Message subject
Hi Postmaster,
%RND_AD_1
%RND_AD_2
Plus: %RND_ALL_OTHER_MEDS
%RND_AD_3
%RND_BUY_TAG www.%DOMAIN_FOR_MAILING.
Best Regards,
Spammer Name
Hmm. Methinks you need some new spamming software, there...
I've had a report of the following email going to someone with a t00b.net email account:
Dear user of T00b.net,
Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content) outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe, follow the instructions.
This email is not from me; the address etc has been forged. The attachment is almost certainly a virus which will install one of the aforementioned proxy-relay trojan servers on your machine.
I'm pleased to say that I've contributed to the nailing of an SMS spammer - I had a letter through from ICSTIS this morning regarding a complaint I sent in a few months ago. They've been fined £15,000, banned from running premium-rate 'phone services for a year and forced to refund anyone who actually called the number.
The scam itself was one of those 'someone you know fancies you' things - but apparently all it did was keep asking you to guess, and always answering no. Also, the SMS spams failed to include pricing information (obligatory for premium-rate services), which was my grounds for complaint.
I just cleared out my spam box. Almost 50,000 messages in just under three weeks. That means that they're coming in at a rate of getting on for two per minute. This is the reason why an opt-out solution to spam is laughable - even if it were leagally enforced (possible) and actually adhered to by the spammers (highly unlikely), I could easily spend all day just opting out of spam...
In case you hadn't realised just how virulent the SoBig-F email virus is, our virus scanner logs show that we've found more than twice as many copies of SoBig-F in the last week as we found all viruses in total for the preceding year.
Last night's movie was A Knight's Tale, a film I knew was going to be fun the first time I saw it - when Queen's We Will Rock You starts up, it manages not to be incongruous with the medieval setting, and it takes you a while to realise that the amassed peasants (and indeed nobles) are stamping, clapping and singing along. This interweaving of the modern and the historical continues throughout the film to good effect.
Re-watching that was inspired by my re-reading of Tamora Pierce's swords and sorcery novels - some of the later of which feature jousting. I've been reading these books for the best part of twenty years - they are "Junior Fiction", aimed at a slightly older age group than Harry Potter - and the three Tortall quartets continue to be among my all-time favourite books. Happily, I can see from Ms. Pierce's site that she has plenty more books planned for the next few years.
somebodies.