15 points
Junk Mail by Lizard Boy
January 10th, 2007 8:36 PM
Tabulations:
Viagra etc.: 45
Stock: 32 (HXPN: 14, LITL: 8, PHYA: 8, MISJ:1, LYJN:1, VTSS:1) (One had the heading "School sent parents 'obese student' warnings", and another "Must be fit, have nice face to get Chinese baby".)
Replica Jewlery: 11
Loans: 12 (they claimed I'd submitted an application already)
Microsoft Products: 5
"Bank" scam: 3
Something in Russian: 9 (One entirely in a picture! Funny thing is, the other ones got through better)
Something in a character language: 3
Online Casino: 8
"Most Potent Male Muscle Boosting System": 3
General Pharmacies: 2 (One Canadian.)
A financial help e-mail.
An e-mail that was...nothing.... This e-mail had a picture at the top of it, and the rest was the meaningless text. However, the picture actually didn't have any content. It was a zero-size picture. The only way this e-mail was advertising anything was that the address it was sent from was "Shopping@goholidays.com.au", and goholidays.com.au is a valid website (vacations, for the curious).
A business news letter of some kind. As far as I can tell it wasn't an advertisement.
One that had gibberish and an attached .jpg file, that it didn't want to display in the body anywhere. I wasn't about to check the attachment, so I don't know what it was advertising, if anything.
I was interested by some of the methods that spam came up with to get past spam filters, and how many were caught anyway. For example, one Viagra spam e-mail had all relevant information in a picture (standard), but the text was all in a "quoted text" block, with the "sender" of that block listed as me. Now, I don't know if that makes it look any better to a spam filter, but it sure is creative. Another interesting thing is that, in the last day at least, of the e-mails that contained fooling text and a picture, only those that contained text before the picture got through my spam filter. The rest had the picture at the top and were blocked.
I wish now that I had tabulated more about their methods of getting past spam filters, and less about the products, but I'm not about to do that again. At least not soon.
Viagra etc.: 45
Stock: 32 (HXPN: 14, LITL: 8, PHYA: 8, MISJ:1, LYJN:1, VTSS:1) (One had the heading "School sent parents 'obese student' warnings", and another "Must be fit, have nice face to get Chinese baby".)
Replica Jewlery: 11
Loans: 12 (they claimed I'd submitted an application already)
Microsoft Products: 5
"Bank" scam: 3
Something in Russian: 9 (One entirely in a picture! Funny thing is, the other ones got through better)
Something in a character language: 3
Online Casino: 8
"Most Potent Male Muscle Boosting System": 3
General Pharmacies: 2 (One Canadian.)
A financial help e-mail.
An e-mail that was...nothing.... This e-mail had a picture at the top of it, and the rest was the meaningless text. However, the picture actually didn't have any content. It was a zero-size picture. The only way this e-mail was advertising anything was that the address it was sent from was "Shopping@goholidays.com.au", and goholidays.com.au is a valid website (vacations, for the curious).
A business news letter of some kind. As far as I can tell it wasn't an advertisement.
One that had gibberish and an attached .jpg file, that it didn't want to display in the body anywhere. I wasn't about to check the attachment, so I don't know what it was advertising, if anything.
I was interested by some of the methods that spam came up with to get past spam filters, and how many were caught anyway. For example, one Viagra spam e-mail had all relevant information in a picture (standard), but the text was all in a "quoted text" block, with the "sender" of that block listed as me. Now, I don't know if that makes it look any better to a spam filter, but it sure is creative. Another interesting thing is that, in the last day at least, of the e-mails that contained fooling text and a picture, only those that contained text before the picture got through my spam filter. The rest had the picture at the top and were blocked.
I wish now that I had tabulated more about their methods of getting past spam filters, and less about the products, but I'm not about to do that again. At least not soon.
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posted by Sean Mahan on January 10th, 2007 10:10 PM
I keeping (waiting for)/(dreading) the day someone finally ends up with one of those "image spams" in their media bin...
posted by Lizard Boy on January 11th, 2007 10:23 AM
Interestingly to me there was a discussion on my dorm chat list about how hard spam filtering is at the same time as I was doing this task.
I think it's great that google ads reads all this spam talk and decides to display "Democracy In Action" adverts.