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Annals of Annoying Spam

I don’t suppose there’s any other sort of spam but the annoying kind. But man has something happened in the last month or so — the spam dam has burst and my annoyance levels are peaking.

For a long while the combination of SpamAssassin and the Mail.app junk filtering was trapping almost everything and I was seeing at most a couple of spam messages a day.

Recently, though, I’m seeing upwards of 50 spam emails a day, and that’s on top of the couple of hundred that are being filtered out through various means.

Certainly the dreaded “image spam” — where the spamminess is hidden inside a graphic surrounded by plausable-reading text — is one culprit: Mail.app seems unable to trap this (the suggested rule to trap this, alas, routes too many of my Air Canada reservation confirmations, etc., to the junk mail filter for my comfort).

But it’s not all image spam — there’s a lot of seemingly basic “VkAGRA for LESS” spam that’s getting through.

Is it only me?

Thursday, October 12, 2006 - 8:40pm
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Comments

Rob Hyndman's picture
Rob Hyndman on October 12, 2006
No, not just you, I think. I’m seeing the same thing and my host uses SA. Also, this: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1159135810487&call_pageid=968350072197&StarSource=RSS
Chuck McKinnon's picture
Chuck McKinnon on October 13, 2006
It’s definitely not just you. I’m hosted at TextDrive, and they have heretofore had excellent spam filtering. But as you say, the last month or so has been just crazy. Thunderbird’s been doing a reasonable job on the client end, though — fewer are getting through than did, say, two weeks ago.
Rob L.'s picture
Rob L. on October 14, 2006
Suddenly I’m getting a tsunami of VkAGRA spam too. Just started today, but Gmail is doing a fine job of diverting them to the spam folder.
Kevin's picture
Kevin on October 15, 2006
If people would not put hundreds of names on the “To: ” line of their messages when sending mail to a group (I’m talking legit mail here), but would rather send the message to themselves and blind copy the list, there would be a LOT less spam because snoopware infected computers (and almost all are) is a (the?) prime vector for spamshiners who want new email addresses. I confronted a spammer who was using ISN to send out junk. I was very direct, “spammers are gutterslime and if that’s what you’re doing then I think you’re a moral reprobate” (perhaps not a direct quote but the real one ought not to be printed). He actually said in response, “I thought they wanted the mail, I bought the CD with a million addresses from a person who ASSURED me everyone on the list wants my email.” We can’t win against that degree of stupidity or bullshit — whichever it was. Spammers should be hit with a $1.00 per message fine when caught and imprisoned until they can pay it — even if that takes years.

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