Weblog Wannabe

I actually got excited over a couple of spam I received today because they had very friendly subject lines. I thought someone was nice enough to take a bit of their precious time to write me a nice, friendly email this weekend. Turned out they were just some spammers telling me to buy some pills that could make my non-existent penis grow 3 inches longer. Sigh.

Did anyone notice that these days spammers encrypt their emails by inserting HTML comment tag in between every word in order to outdo your email filters? They do. I caught it because I’m my own email filter. I check my emails using Ultrafunk Popcorn. I use it mostly to remove spam before downloading my email into my email client of choice (which is not Outlook Express, in case you’re wondering). I can read and reply with it, but I can’t view attachments, which is not really that bad since most email attachments I get are virus anyway.

So yeah, I’m more pathetic than spammers. That was all I wanted to tell you. Just thought I’d do it in a long-winded way to kill the time.

Quacks on I Hate Weekends

Jason D was saying the same today.

By the way, is any of your spam like this? Just wondering.

I wish. That would be nice for a change. My favourite piece of spam is the ones that tell me to buy diploma from “prestigious unaccredited universities” to hang on the wall and impress my friends. Heh.

I use POP3 Scan Mailbox to check my email before I download it with Pegasus. I use Pegasus to write most of my email, but I also use Opera’s email client and Mozilla’s email client.

I checked out Popcorn and it looks like it is better than POP3 Scan Mailbox and I may give it a try later.

I never open spam and I haven’t done anything this weekend either.

Have a good week!

I’ve noticed a lot of the spam I’m receiving now has a bunch of jibberish at the start of the email and/or in the subject line (ie. swzxdw ewi sioew).

I also noticed that when I went through to delete about 50 most recent pieces of spam from the server, I really only had 7 different pieces. I could swear I deleted the same exact html styled email 3 or 4 times.

The gibberish is to fool filters which learn to block phrases like ‘autos’ ‘enlargement’ ‘FREE’ and ‘$$$’ - if there’s a lot of words that it doesn’t recognise, it may think the email is legitimate.

I don’t understand spammers who try to get around anti-spam tools. After all, people with anti-spam tools don’t want spam and will not want to buy their products, so why should they bother making the extra effort to get through to those people?

I wasn’t even talking about the gibberish in the subject line (though I have noticed that as well). I was talking about the gibberish within HTML comment tag in the body of the spam inserted in between words. It looks something like this:

Ma<!-- bfioq0w --&gtke Yo<!-- ycfqwye -->ur Pe<!-- hcwif -->nis Lo<!-- itgv -->nger.

I’ve never noticed that “trick” before.

What i noticed is that more and more spammers include identifiers in their image and link tags. For example the embedded image is “www.server.com/…/image.php?id=Ac45dsdssd”

Like this, by opening the mail or just using the preview panel of your email client, they know your email is valid.

I personnaly use SpamAssassin to detect spam mails. I love it because all suspicious messages aren’t deleted form the server but are included as attachements in a message with SPAM !! as subject.

You can after make a rule and do what you want of these messages.

To talk about the week end, i sometimes get the same feeling, but i just try to make things i can’t do during the week, so these 2 days become less boring.

I am pathetic too. I am now glad because I work weekends and I can pretend this is my excuse for being a loser.

{This discussion is closed. Thanks to all who participated.}