I love finding “good art” in weird places. “Good art” being anything that evokes something within one’s self. You know, makes you feel a way you wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t been there… Anyways:
Only the most creative and incoherent messages make it past my filters. Here’s a small bit of one I got last night that began with “Hello possum,”:
Now that’s sort of compelling, isn’t it? Has anyone else run across some gem of Dada like this?
[sub]It was an ad for a weight-loss pill, I think. Or maybe for vast amounts of LSD-25. Hard to tell.[/sub]
I would love to get my own back on these spammers!
My idea was to spam them right back. If you had a program that “returns to sender” and spam you get they might start thinking again. In my eyes what the program would do is scan the email for any email addresses and then forward a hundred copies of the spam straight back to them!
One person doign this wouldn’t make a difference but imagine if it was 10’s of thousands of people with this code.
LET THE FIGHT BACK BEGIN!
or should we jsut meakly accept all this crap jamming up our in boxes every day?
To give an example I recently set my land lady up with a pc and a email account with btopenworld. within a week she was getting 100’s of pornographic spam a week. (BTW she’s 75!) Iasked as politely as I could what kind of sites she had been on and all she was doing was looking at hotels abroad for her holidays.
The mistake she made was giving out her email adderess to all these oversees companies to ask for more information. It just takes one to pass on the address to a spammer for a few cents and thats it.
I propose a fight. Any spammer is far game in my book
I never read the actual spam messages, because most of them are just a bunch of HTML garbage, but the subjects themselves can be pretty interesting. One of my favorites was
“Tammy384, No more run around to fill your medication!lpnalrytziz blaqgoonctw jzb q d tnhiz e zmthzv avzz tdwzoi”
First off, I’m not Tammy384, but that’s not important. Just imagine someone on an infomercial saying that outloud. “No more run around to fill your medicationPNALRYTZIZ BLAQGOONCTW JZB!!!”
Please, please don’t do this. There is no chance at all that this could do any good, and considerable chance that it could do harm. There are three possibilities for the e-mail address you see for spam. First, it can be nonexistant, in which case you’re just throwing all of your replies into the garbage bin (but slightly congesting the Internet in the process). Second, it might be a real address monitored by a machine. In this case, it’ll ignore any counter-spam you send it, and see above. And the third possibility is that the spam will spoof the e-mail address of some innocent bystander, perhaps someone the spammer is angry at. In this case, you’d just be sending hundreds of spams to an innocent victim, and hence become part of the problem.
In no case is any real spammer ever going to see your messages.
I’ve been collecting the names that the spam ostensibly comes from with the intention to write a novel with them all someday.
There will be a sensual love scene between Barrister George Karlsson and Alba Villanueva, while Police Chief Joseph Ndoum solves the murder of Chersulyma Azucenatoth, and enterprising college student Lakisha Amos finds a devastating secret in the mansion of Abdul Sanderson. Dr. Pequeno will show up at the end and deliver his rousing speech: “Have u see the video of heiress from the midia? Porn a career killer? Not for her!”
I do love the looniness of the seemingly random strings of words, letters, etc. in junk mail. Does anyone have any idea what algorithm or pattern the spammers are running their messages through? The only pattern I can readily discern is that the usual suspects, wordwise, are altered, obscured, or made into acronyms (e.g. v1agra, P.O.R.N., referring to Paris Hilton as the “heiress”). But what’s the justification behind the lists of seemingly unrelated words, like at the bottom of DN’s example? I can only guess that if there are a certain number of words in the email that are innocuous, then the filters must think it’s legit.
One interesting thing: these lists of words provide a nice balance with certain older websites that listed as many naughty (i.e. frequently searched) words as they could to draw in traffic. They were typically displayed in black on a black background at the bottom of the site and weren’t part of the site’s design; they were just there to register on Google.