In which my (formerly) virginal, pristine and untouched hotmail account is spammed.

The BBQ Pit
1

I realize that it’s neither cool nor original to rant about spam. Everybody gets it and I’m sure it’s been pitted a zillion times.

This is different.

In 1997 as my college career was winding down I needed an email address that would span my college and post college life. I had owned “the other” email address (myusernamehere@hotmail.com) for a few years, but I’m not about to ask potential employers to just give me a shout at Bruce_Daddy… After a few attempts I finally garnered FirstnameMILastname@hotmail.com. Beautiful. Now for 6 years, this email address has only been given to potential employers and monster.com. I believe the latter has been my undoing. Around Christmas my contract ran out and I couldn’t find another. I registered at monster.com and signed up for their daily job findings which were pretty useless for a CS major:

This nevertheless served as a reminder to go to monster and check out the day’s new listings. For 5 months I would log on and be prepared to delete my one email from monster daily:

Today, dear friends was different. Today, without a second thought, I logged in as Bruce_Daddy, deleted 60 spams and answered the 1 legit email, logged off, log back on as (pure as the driven snow) other account and :eek:

14 messages. Fourteen GOD DAMN GET YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF ME YOU DAMN DIRTY APE FUCKTARDS MESSAGES!!! How can this be?! A quick glance assures me that I have not, in fact, received 14 offers to be Jennifer Love Hewitt’s sponge boy or neither has Elizabeth Hurley decided she needs a new pool boy. No no no. No. What will I be inundated with for the REST OF MY LIFE as I open my beautiful namesake email account every day? Let’s take a look.

Ah, my good buddy FAIN. I haven’t talked with FAIN in a while.

WHO THE FUCK IS FAIN??? Why is he emailing me about Mark Martin’s car???

Oh. It’s about my penis. :rolleyes: My useless, limp penis. Why do I need Viagra, FAIN, when I DONT GET LAID EVER. Thanks for reminding me of this FAIN.

What’s next?

HEINRICH? Isn’t that something to help choking people? Or else very Nazi sounding? Hein Riech? Mien Kompff? Well, whatever, German boy. Check your engrish dictionary because it’s spelled W-H-O-L-E-S-A-L-E.

(Sigh) Who else is wiping their shitty ass all over my baby’s-bottom-like email account?

Something about marketing. Moving on.

Ok, I changed it to Bruce_Daddy but in fact it was my real name with my middle initial stuck in there. As if to taunt me further:

Spammer: We found your email address. It’s your real name. Na na na na na na.

Lengthen my private parts? My Howard Stern movie? Why would I wa. . . oh. It’s my penis again. My waste of human skin and about 4 grams of humanflesh. Safely? I was thinking more along the lines of how they got Ethan Hawke a little taller in Gattaca. You know, cut . . . nevermind.

(feeling woozy now)

Churk hoo? Churk who? Does this have to do with a cookout? Of course not. It’s my non-turgid urine hose. And you misspelled it. Oh, and Mary doesn’t call it a baseball. She’s got another name for it.

Vitamins? Victrola? Vigorous oral sex? :buzzer: More Viagra.

So ends what may be the longest streak in the internet history books for unspammed hotmail accounts. Sadly, my once proud majestic inbox is now reduced to the medium through which lowlifes taunt my arid sex life and offer me X-10 cams for my home security.

I may as well use it to “register” to websites now.

:frowning:

2

You didn’t raise your hotmail account very well, now did you? A formerly virginal account suddenly turns into a horny e-mail slut … what books and magazines are you allowing your account to read? After all, it’s only SIX YEARS OLD!!!

:slight_smile:

3

They’re cunning fuckers, y’know. I have a similar hotmail account; largely pristine for 4 years, bar about one advert for “prestigious non-accredited diplomas” per month. Now the rate has gone up (albeit only to one every couple of days), largely due to what appear to be dictionary-style attacks, which is annoying. What’s extra annoying though is the way they circumnavigate filters. Firstly, the subject is largely meaningless or so mis-spelled as to be beyond filtering. The clever bit is the body though; it’s html, and (ab)uses the fact that html renderers simply ignore any tags they don’t understand. So what it does is insert junk tags in the middle of every word, thusly:

etc. etc… Now hotmail gets a lot of stick for not having good filters, but I’m buggered if I know how you filter for this sort of thing without massive overhead; plus the headers imply that the spam comes from some poor sucker’s compromised machine, not from an open relay, so blacklisting doesn’t help either.

To me it looks like long term the only way to go is trusted sources; namely, everyone signs their email as a matter of course, and anyone found spamming gets their signature revoked pronto. So, people of the world! Download PGP or GPG and get signing! And techie people of the world! Make PGP cheaper or GPG friendlier! (GPG and WinPT are an excellent combination, incidentally, but probably still not quite for the mass market…)

4

Something interesting happened the other day. I have disabled cookies in my browser (IE6), so the thing prompts me. I was quite surprised when I got the prompt from an e-mail. It was spam, of course, for “horny teenage sluts”, and in html-format. I didn’t open it. I rarely open e-mail, but read them on preview in Outlook Express. They only get opened if I decide to answer. And I wasn’t even reading, it was just the first mail flooding my inbox, so naturally it got highlighted. If I hadn’t had the option of prompting for cookies, there would have been on for “horny teenage sluts” on my computer now.

They’re getting more and more annoying.

5

Yeah, but in hotmail years, it’s 42!

6

Can Hotmail.

Go for http://www.mail.com instead. It’s virtually spam free by comparison. I have converted so many friends and colleagues over to Mail.com, and they have all been delighted.

You get a much better choice of usernames and domain names (eg lawyer.com, journalist.com) and it looks infinitely more professional and acceptable to potential employers not having a Hotmail address, and a name like Brent_Jones rather than Brent_Jones_1974_2@ - which is what people end up with at Hotmail.

7

You reminded me of something.

[Yoda]
There is another. . .
[/Yoda]

As an experiment, I am going to post another email address I have here. I get 0 emails at this address because nobody knows about it, I just signed up for the hell of it many moons ago. I’m curious to see if the “crawlers” can find it by it simply being posted on a message board. (deep breath)

Bruce_Daddy@budweiser.com

Or I could start giving it out to potential employers! :slight_smile: