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Shoveling The Unending Herculean Labor of Sisyphus
Saturday, 24 October 2009 16:06Cruising The Spam Filters
My main personal email account has a pretty reasonable spam filter. Hardly ever does anything sucky make it through, but since it displays a nice "Spam 2" notice if there are two messages in the Spam folder, it's easy to check and delete.
Not so pleasant with my work account. First, about half the email I get in my Inbox actually comes from No Address or some sort of %&*%#$! character swearing which is probably an ASCII attempt at some non-lettered language or out-and-out Crap/Spam. Some of it is so obviously spamming, I wonder just what the hell kind of algorithm the spam filter uses. As for the spam filter, it's a third-party add-on product, requiring one to log separately into your account in the Pure Spam (not its real name) filter system. Then you can decide to delete or accept or ignore messages based only on their email sender names and part of the subject header. Oh, you can hover your mouse over the sender's name or the subject and get a mouse-over box with what's really there. You cannot see the actual email in the spam system, you'd have to approve the message, and then read it over in the email inbox.
Why do I put up with such an obviously Mickey Mouse system? Because I have no choice. Also, twice I've discovered Important E-Mails in amongst the spam, so I really do have to wade through it all.
These Assholes Should Just Die
I guess I let the Pure Spam go for over a week or two. Just finished wading through 72 pages of spam notices, 20 to a page, and naturally found nothing of value.
It is a wee bit interesting to see the rough breakdown of types of messages and the inane attemptspeople sub-human spammers use in their Subject lines to try to get me to read their crap. Mrs. Dr. Phil keeps saying that there are good Sociology Ph.D. dissertation topics in amongst the spam headers. But really, I am NOT going to read any spam message from me. So use your own email address, even it's if a cutout or just plain false.
Last year there were a significant number of spams for cheap/free copies of Photoshop, AutoCad and other expensive pieces of software. Today? Almost none of those. This summer it was all about the Cialis. Now a good chunk is still about ED drugs, but Cialis is almost never mentioned by name, Viagra a bit more mention. A few messages about actress/starlet/model/singer/whore X or Y behaving badly on video. But the big winner on those 72 pages, possibly hitting as high as 50% of the crap, were degree diplomas -- any kind your want. Some from "real universities".
Uh-huh. Yeah, right. And while we're on this subject, WTF are you doing sending degree scam spam to someone who earned a Ph.D. the hard way? And Faculty/Staff at a university? Are there that many professors who don't have real degrees, that you need to sell them something so fake that it'd be worse than having no degrees at all? Puh-lease!
The Law of Small Numbers (and Small Minds)
Sigh. The sad thing is not that the Internet is so riddled with these little worms, but rather they wouldn't send out spam if it didn't work. I mean, you don't actually have to have that many idiots responding out of hundreds or thousands of spams sent to make some money, apparently. So until someone decides that it IS fair game to hunt these people down and hang them from their testicles until they are either dead or maimed, we are going to have to deal with ever more clever (so to speak) spammer techniques. And as long as spam filters aren't totally reliable, I am going to have to wade through the crap.
Just so I don't miss something important, such as happened twice. Over years.
Sigh.
Dr. Phil
My main personal email account has a pretty reasonable spam filter. Hardly ever does anything sucky make it through, but since it displays a nice "Spam 2" notice if there are two messages in the Spam folder, it's easy to check and delete.
Not so pleasant with my work account. First, about half the email I get in my Inbox actually comes from No Address or some sort of %&*%#$! character swearing which is probably an ASCII attempt at some non-lettered language or out-and-out Crap/Spam. Some of it is so obviously spamming, I wonder just what the hell kind of algorithm the spam filter uses. As for the spam filter, it's a third-party add-on product, requiring one to log separately into your account in the Pure Spam (not its real name) filter system. Then you can decide to delete or accept or ignore messages based only on their email sender names and part of the subject header. Oh, you can hover your mouse over the sender's name or the subject and get a mouse-over box with what's really there. You cannot see the actual email in the spam system, you'd have to approve the message, and then read it over in the email inbox.
Why do I put up with such an obviously Mickey Mouse system? Because I have no choice. Also, twice I've discovered Important E-Mails in amongst the spam, so I really do have to wade through it all.
These Assholes Should Just Die
I guess I let the Pure Spam go for over a week or two. Just finished wading through 72 pages of spam notices, 20 to a page, and naturally found nothing of value.
It is a wee bit interesting to see the rough breakdown of types of messages and the inane attempts
Last year there were a significant number of spams for cheap/free copies of Photoshop, AutoCad and other expensive pieces of software. Today? Almost none of those. This summer it was all about the Cialis. Now a good chunk is still about ED drugs, but Cialis is almost never mentioned by name, Viagra a bit more mention. A few messages about actress/starlet/model/singer/whore X or Y behaving badly on video. But the big winner on those 72 pages, possibly hitting as high as 50% of the crap, were degree diplomas -- any kind your want. Some from "real universities".
Uh-huh. Yeah, right. And while we're on this subject, WTF are you doing sending degree scam spam to someone who earned a Ph.D. the hard way? And Faculty/Staff at a university? Are there that many professors who don't have real degrees, that you need to sell them something so fake that it'd be worse than having no degrees at all? Puh-lease!
The Law of Small Numbers (and Small Minds)
Sigh. The sad thing is not that the Internet is so riddled with these little worms, but rather they wouldn't send out spam if it didn't work. I mean, you don't actually have to have that many idiots responding out of hundreds or thousands of spams sent to make some money, apparently. So until someone decides that it IS fair game to hunt these people down and hang them from their testicles until they are either dead or maimed, we are going to have to deal with ever more clever (so to speak) spammer techniques. And as long as spam filters aren't totally reliable, I am going to have to wade through the crap.
Just so I don't miss something important, such as happened twice. Over years.
Sigh.
Dr. Phil
