Category: Spam

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Return Path says the majority of spam complaints relate to legitimate emails.

There are two issues here:

  1. A lot of people don’t make a distinction between “email I don’t want anymore” and “email I didn’t want in the first place,” even though the appropriate responses are different. (One deserves an unsubscribe. The other deserves reporting, blocking, censure, etc.)
  2. A lot of marketers…how shall I put this?…make rather optimistic assumptions about whether people want their marketing messages.

Originally posted on Google+

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So I’ve been getting generic comment spams on Speed Force today, the kind that look like someone took a bunch of compliments and a thesaurus and stuck them in a salad shooter.  I started reading.  I started reading this one aloud:

Thank you a lot for providing individuals with remarkably pleasant chance to discover important secrets from this web site. It is often very awesome and full of a lot of fun for me personally and my office co-workers to search the blog at a minimum 3 times in one week to find out the newest items you have got. And lastly, I am just certainly motivated concerning the splendid principles served by you. Some 1 ideas on this page are ultimately the simplest I’ve ever had.

I got about halfway through, and Katie stopped me, saying, “What, you got a comment from Faz?”

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A series of spam subjects in my junk folder, sorted alphabetically. I can’t help but read them as someone repeatedly trying to get my attention, getting more frantic and frustrated as time goes by.

how are you doing?

how are you getting on?

How Are You Getting Along?

How are you,

HOW ARE YOU.

How Do You Do.

how are you getting along?

HOW DO YOU DO ,

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Here’s another comment spammer whose software plugged in every phrase on its generic comment list instead of picking one at random. Notice how vague these tend to be, so that they could easily apply to almost any post on almost any site.

If you see any of these comments show up on your blog, chances are good that it’s a spammer trying to get a backlink to their shady site, not someone who actually wants to contribute to the conversation.

(Originally cross-posted from LOL Spam)

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You’ve probably seen it: comments that say something entirely vague and either flattering or condescending, that could apply to just about any article. And then they link to an “escort” site, or a pill seller…or some small-town insurance office in the middle of nowhere who hired a black hat “SEO expert” who promised he’d get them backlinks and doesn’t care about the site’s reputation.

I got a great one last week: Somehow instead of getting one randomly-chosen message from a set, I got all of them in one comment: Continue reading →