Category: Spam

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I received an odd email today which consisted solely of:

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ….
That which brings the highest happiness!!

A little Googling, and apparently gouranga is a Hare Krishna term for happiness, also used in the sense of “be happy” and is mysteriously scrawled on bridges in the UK. (Hmm, reminds me of the “Anzel is Love” signs someone plastered all over UCI for a few weeks in the mid-1990s.)

It also seems that the gouranga spam has been around a while.

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Subject line (slightly expurgated) from a spam this morning:

Wow MILFS can f*** like mhrotefucesrk!

My first thought was, “like what?” Then I realized it was an anagram. Not unlike the naked sushi spammers, just taken a bit further to the point where it took a few seconds to realize it wasn’t just gibberish. And of course, if you think about it, the statement isn’t entirely logical.

Actually, the rest of the message is rather bizarre. I’m not sure how much I want to actually paste here, though. The footer is safe enough, if odd:

Showing us the beautiful light,
The chalice holds what quenches thirst
Not for me, while I stare at the cold moon

They missed the chance to make the last line an unsubscribe link, and the text is different in the plaintext part, so it’s clearly just random poetry bits.

The website clearly uses a wildcard name, and one of the links is to horrible.bl******.com (with a few extra letters)—not exactly enticing.

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Making the rounds this week: IO Error’s critique of “nofollow”, the link add-on that was supposed to stop comment spam, but hasn’t even slowed it down. He suggests that it was never intended to: it was simply a sneaky way to lower blogs’ rankings in search engines.

Now, I don’t have a problem with the idea of being able to tack a note onto a link and tell Google not to treat it as an endorsement. But the way it’s been implemented in most blog software—blindly applying it to all links in comments—is overkill. Legitimate, useful, interesting comments should factor into the resource’s ranking, for all the reasons IO Error provides.

Where rel="nofollow" does help with comments is in devaluing the spam that slips through your filters overnight. If a search engine bot happens to crawl your page between the time the comment hits and the time you see it and remove it, nofollow will at least make the spam less effective. Of course, you only need it active for a day or two (depending on how often you check). Once you’ve cleaned the junk out, you want what’s left to get the rank boost it deserves. I’ve been using the No Nofollow plugin to do this since March.

In short, I don’t think that rel="nofollow" is a bad idea in itself. It’s just being used the wrong way.

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I just can’t figure out what this message is supposed to be. My first thought was that someone was replying to spam that used a forged sender, but it scored 11 points in SpamAssassin for forged headers (it claimed to be from Yahoo, but wasn’t), a date stamp from the future, and Bayesian analysis.

From: Stock Advisor <probably fake address>
To: Stock Advisor <target address>
Subject: Go where?

>Go Away!

To top it off, it showed up in several spam traps with different subjects and senders, but the same two-word body. Maybe it’s a probe of some sort?