Category: Spam

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OK, it’s time someone collected these comments from the SpamAssassin-Talk mailing list.

A week ago, Matthew Cline posted “Vowel Duplication Humor”

Subject: Regaain Your Yoooouth

Text: Hi Reyna, Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!

It’s like being spammed by ghosts. “Your dooOoooOOommmmed!! DoooOOoOOOoommed!!”

Today, in a thread describing the pattern as “stuck key” spam, Justin Mason said:

ha! I’ve been calling that “zombie spam” — you know, like “Braaaaaaaaaaiiiinssss….”

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I hit a new milestone today: I received my first spam in Hebrew.

Most spam I get is in English (or some horrendously-misspelled imitation thereof). I’ve gotten spam in Portuguese since college. I frequently see spam in Japanese, Chinese and Russian (and possibly other Cyrillic languages, but I can’t tell them apart). I occasionally see spam in Korean, and once in a while even in Arabic. Lately I’ve started seeing spam in French, and of course over the past week lots of people have been getting racist political spam in German.

I think I’m now caught up on nearly every writing system that’s likely to see use in email. Thai may be all that’s left.

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Sometime around 1997 I started getting a lot of spam from Brazil. I don’t mean relayed through Brazil, everyone gets that these days, I mean spam from businesses and groups in Brazil, in Portuguese, intended for a Brazilian audience. I don’t know how they came up with my address, although I suspect an unscrupulous ISP picked up on it when someone emailed me about translating my Flash site that summer.

Usually I just toss them, but every once in a while I try to puzzle them out (especially since I took some Spanish classes a few years ago – the languages are just similar enough I can usually catch the gist). This one was interesting:

Novidade na pesquisa dos discos voadores no Brasil

Visite o site da Revista UFO e conheça o movimento nacional que os ufólogos estão promovendo desde abril para pedir o reconhecimento oficial da Ufologia. Trata-se da campanha UFOs: LIBERDADE DE INFORMAÇÕES JÁ, que já conta com um abaixo-assinado popular com mais de 3 mil assinaturas. Todas as pessoas interessadas no assunto podem participar do movimento e assinar a petição, que será entregue às autoridades federais com um pedido de abertura de seus arquivos secretos contendo registros de observações de UFOs em nosso Território.

It’s about an online UFO magazine, and an effort to petition the Brazilian government to release classified information about UFO sightings and close encounters in Brazil. I got about this far before I decided to try Google’s translation service, and I’ll try to provide a tidied up version:

New in flying saucer research in Brazil [Google translated “discos voadores” as “flying records,” which conjured up interesting images.]

Visit the site of UFO Magazine and learn about the national movement ufologists have been promoting since April to ask for official recognition of ufology. About the UFO campaign “Freedom of Information Now,” that already counts more than three thousand signatures. All people interested in the subject can participate in the movement and sign the petition that will be delivered to the federal authorities with a demand to open its classified records [Google suggested “private archives”] on UFOs in our territory.

It then goes on for another paragraph about the magazine’s history, and talks about “UFO sightings in our airspace and direct contact between humans and extraerrestrial civilizations that have visisted us” (I’m pretty sure that’s what it says, anyway).

Amazingly, the message footer contains the line “Essa mensagem não é spam.” — literally, “This message is not spam.” It seems that some aspects of spam are universal.

I mean, seriously, how do you take “Brazilian UFO enthusiasts” as your criteria and come up with an English-speaking California native whose website deals with comic books, creative writing, photography, and Linux? No, they just got my address off of the same list that’s been passed around Brazil for the past seven years.

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These people are no longer amusing. I’ve been getting about 10 messages a day from them. On Friday I actually had to add a rule to the server config to detect their domain names, since half of them didn’t score high enough to get labeled as spam. (Bayes training helped, but not enough.) And some of their ads are for really sick stuff – not just garden-variety porn, but fetishes I don’t even want to hear about.

They all have the same structure, the same types of misspellings, the same type of Bayes poison, and point to a website named after food. And while names like “hot carrot soup dot com” and “sexy naked sushi dot com” (I won’t list the exact URLs, since that would only improve their page rank) were funny at first, their persistence has gotten %@*! annoying. Why the heck do they need to send me 10 messages a day advertising what’s clearly one site? And why cluster them?

Mandated opt-out links aren’t enough. Even if spammers weren’t already known to ignore/abuse requests to be removed, it’s obvious that these aren’t complying with other provisions of federal law (fake return addresses, no street address, no “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” tag on the subject line), so why should anyone assume they’ll honor the unsubscribe links?

The two main email accreditation companies (OK, the only two I know of), Habeas and Bonded Sender, hold their clients to opt-in only criteria. So did California’s stillborn anti-spam law (superseded by federal law the day it was to go into effect). Why couldn’t congress do the same? I do think CAN-SPAM is better than nothing, but it’s done little to stem the tide in the 5 months it’s been active.

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I’m sure you’ve seen spam that includes random bits of text, maybe out of novels or legal documents or lists of sayings. They do this to confuse filters that learn based on messages people classify as spam or non-spam. The idea is that if there’s enough garbage mixed in with the spam, these filters will see non-spam patterns in the spam — or just miss the spam patterns in all the noise — and be less effective.

Well, one just came across my desk that started with this highly appropriate phrase:

Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.

This was followed by sensationalist “best product” and “unbeatable” deals. (You know, the $50 copy of Windows XP that they’ll probably claim fell off a truck or something.)

In other words, the kind of post that just needs more salt.