Stupid Spammers
Posted July 5th, 2003 @ 08:36am by Erik J. Barzeski
You know, I might be more inclined to open spam with the subject "Nice meeting you" or "Software Idea" or "Hey, It's Mike" if I didn't tend to receive about fourteen copies at a time, all with different sender names.
Spammers are stupid, but the people that continue to open spam, thus making it a profitable and effective marketing tool, are "stupider."
If I'm suspicious that an email is spam, I export the email and open it in BBEdit, thus avoiding any "tricky image" callbacks that mark my address as valid. I rarely have to guess, though: spam is just so obvious.
Donate Life
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 8:59am #
I get about 50-70 spams a day (most grabbed my address from my homepage or cdc). If I'd do your BBEdit-trick to all of them, I couldn't do anything else all day. I just disabled displaying images in Apple Mail, that takes care of it.
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 9:17am #
I never said I do the BBEdit trick to all of them. I do it to about two per week. SpamSieve marks my spam, but I still flip through the subject/sender of "likely spam" to make sure there are no false positives.
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 9:44am #
I use Entourage and if I'm suspicious about a message, I open its source (View -> Source) instead of opening the message itself.
Oh, and I use Popfile to filter spam (~100 per day). Works brilliantly.
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 10:28am #
Spam Sucks
nslog doesn't like Spam. Who knew! I hear all these people talk about getting anywhere from 50 to hundreds of spam messages a day. I get 0 messages most day. If I do get some, it's usually once in a...
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 10:55am #
One thing I've noticed about some of those spams is that the subject line will usually help give itself away as well. It won't be just "Nice meeting you", but "Nice meeting you[about 10-15 spaces] xssdf[some nonsense characters]". When I see those nonsense characters, I know it's a spam message and act accordingly.
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 11:01am #
I use lots of filtering and I usually manage to avoid seeing spam in my inbox.
For my public address, I use pobox.com and in addition to their spam filters (set to delete any spam), I also added my own filters to delete mail containing certain subjects, from certain domains, or containing particular strings in the body, or forward them to a hotmail address I use as a spam receptacle.
At macmegasite & mc-development.com, the server includes spam assassin, plus I've added some custom filters to delete certain spams.
For anything that gets through (1-2 pieces a day), Mail.app's junk mail filter usually catches it.
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 11:06am #
I let all (nearly - I block a few domains on my server) through to SpamSieve, then examine - once a day or so - my possible spam for false positives.
95% accuracy may be great, and all, but if one email is deleted that shouldn't be, it could cost me large amounts of dinero ($$$), a chance to do something really cool, or whatever.
Posted 05 Jul 2003 at 1:22pm #
I use Mailsmith and it doesn't display in HTML on purpose... If you want to view an HTML email you can open it up in the browser of your choice with a click. Not bad.
I get about a 100 or so a day... But like Erik I'd rather have a few more get by and have 0 false positives.
Posted 06 Jul 2003 at 6:59pm #
What a coincidence -- I just wrote something about this myself. I calculated that I will get about 100,000 spams this year. That turned out to be about 682 megabytes worth!
Yikes
Steve