This one threw me for a second until I realized I was only seeing the plain-text part:
Before you can purchase magical spells at the Mage Guild, you will have to find Orations by Poggio in the monastery of St. Gall A.D. 1416.
Once I noticed the message had HTML and a GIF image, I realized it was just another image-only spam with random words and random code.
But, hey, I liked the opening line!
Hmm, CNET reports that spammers are starting to route zombies’ mail through the ISP’s servers. (Hmm, that sounds familiar.) I don’t know about the “email meltdown” Linford warns against, but it will require a change in tactics. And so the escalation continues…
Remember Charles Booher, the spam victim who was arrested for making death threats to the sender? (Early reports were that the person on the other end of the phone was an innocent third-party, but that turns out to have been a smoke screen.)
Aunty Spam reports sad news: apparently Booher committed suicide last month, just a week before his court date.
I mentioned I set up some new spam traps a few weeks ago. This amusing disclaimer appeared in one of them over the weekend:
You have received this message for one of the following reasons:
1) By accident.
2) Someone else is using your email address without your knowledge.
3) You have responded to one of our free gifts/courses.
4) You have sent an e-mail to one of our email addresses.
5) You are a member of one of the safelists, by doing so, you have agreed to receive this message
Heh. I like #1. They accidentally harvested the address from a web page and added it to their lists. “You know, I was surfing the web, and I left my autospam-assistant program running, and one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, it was spamming you.”
Of course, the rest of the disclaimer is funny too, if you’re familiar with the history of spam legislation. Continue reading
The Register has published an interview with a link spammer. Link spamming is more like vandalism than junk mail, but the spammers still fall back on the old “It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments” BS. Do we need to put up a digital “No Trespassing” sign? Does anyone really think the spammers would honor it?
The interviewee explains that “it’s nothing personal,” a cliché you probably can’t even get into a script without acknowledging its triteness. You know, I’m sure if someone breaks into my house and uses my printer to make a few hundred posters, it’s nothing personal either…but it doesn’t justify it.
