More Spam

According to the Guardian today 27% of homes in the UK connected to the internet recieve at least 10 spam messages per day, lucky them I’ve had to kill of two e-mail address in the last four years and still get around 60 per day.

Fortunatly using Thunderbird and it’s brilliant Junk Mail filter in conjunction with the filtering provided by Fasthosts means I rarely see any in my inbox - and rarely get any real messages in the Junk folder.

This line is particularly scary though “More than one in 10 users (14%) opened up the unwanted messages, putting their computers at risk of viruses.”

Do people not get it, I mean a spam message is pretty easy to spot from a mile off - infact I’ll go to my inbox now and look at the first five spam messages and their subject … hold on …

This is a list of five spam messages in my inbox right now showing the from and subject fields (I have html and rich text e-mail turned off and often check through the fasthosts supplied web interface).

Just in case someone is reading this that doesn’t get how to spot a spam message I’ve included a brief breakdown for each one.

Jarrod Middleton - Your money, office building
Your money, office building - what the hell does that mean when its at home? OK the first thing to look at here is the ‘from’, do you know anyone called Jarrod Middleton and if you do would he be e-mailing you about your money and an office building? If yes then ok you may have a valid reason to open it but come one!

I decided to open this one with html off so just looking at plain text to see what Your money, office building actually means.

The first paragraph says “Even if you have no erectin problems SOFT CIAzLIS
would help you to make BETTER SE  X MORE OFTEN! and to bring  unimagnable plesure to her.”

Which is nice - still not sure what that has to do with my office building though. This was the only message the fasthosts filter didn’t pick up on, every other spam message was flagged with —SPAM— before the subject.

Otto Ferris - Notice: Loww mortagee ratee approved¼br /> I don’t think I need to explain this one, loww, mortagee, ratee? If it was from a bank you’d hope they’d at least spell the subject correctly and it would probably have come from something like Customer Services at ‘Your Bank’ - but those e-mails are for a completely different blog post, if you get one of those then chances are it’s a phishing e-mail, look up phishing on google.

Luann Ladd  - Re:
Mason Barrow - Re:
Rachelle Kaplan - Re:
I’ll do the final three together as they’re obviously from the same spam group/company/demon - in my inbox these actually had the subject —SPAM— Re: because the fasthosts filter picked them up.

Unless you know someone called Luann Ladd, Mason Barrow or Rachelle Kaplan who e-mails you regularly and is supposed to be replying to an e-mail you sent them without a subject (use subjects it makes life easier when you get a high volume of e-mails) then delete these straight away.

These are often the most dangerous as well, the first two were plain, simple spam, trying to sell you something you don’t want - these are likely to be the virus or trojan carriers - the ones that actually want to infect your system.

Hope that little, patronising, slightly sarcastic tutorial helped you.

One final thing

While on the subject of spam a welsh spam filtering company can now use Spam in their trademark - the company NetBop technologies was in a dispute with US company Hormel foods over the word (also meaning - in the Python sense Shoulder of Pork and hAM), NetBop want to call their product (and can call their product) Bopspam and Hormel don’t want them to.

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