When spam goes wrong
I’ve been seeing a lot of blog posts about spam recently, probably set off by this post from Dale Dougherty on how we’re losing the war on spam. I just got a spam message that makes me think we’re doing quite a good job fighting against it. It’s not that I’m getting less spam than before, far from it, but I have a filtering technique that usually works very well.
The message that I’m referring to got filtered as spam, but because of the title and the reasonable name of the sender I had a quick look to confirm that it was in fact spam. It was, and I’ve been getting similar ones way too many times, but this time the text they had grabbed from somewhere was an excerpt of the Atom RFC, and the image that tried to make me buy some shares was tiny with dark striped text on black.
There’s something strange about getting a spam where the main message they’re trying to sell is unreadable and the body they’ve slapped on to it to avoid filtering is actually something that’s interesting and valuable.
