This one was sent to ftp@(a domain name we host):
Your Loan/Mortgage Application has been processed and
we can finance you at a low 3% rate.
Funny, I don’t remember “applies for refinancing” on our FTP server’s list of capabilities!
Category: Spam
Clearly, they didn’t learn spelling!
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many misspellings of “college” in one email! Excerpts:
Real Cllgeoe Girls
Neeswt Tnocoelhgy for Gteting Off!
Find out what these cleolge girls REALLY learend at shocol….
And my favorite bit, the label for the unsubscribe link:
Hold Off This Rubbish
All the obfuscation did nothing to disguise the spam – it still got labeled – but it does make for some entertaining reading!
Interesting use of technology
Yahoo has finally released its specification for its DomainKeys email authentication scheme. Included is the following patent license (emphasis added):
Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.
Yodel?
Now that’s irony
I noticed a new comment this morning on an 8-month old post about a case of comment spam.
And you know what? It was cleverly disguised comment spam. It actually quoted the post, but it linked to a site (in Japanese) full of links to online casinos and similar junk.
It’s gone now…
Click where?
I just received spam advertising a book about fascism. It’s not your typical spam — it just looks like the introduction to a book, placed in email and sent — unsolicited of course — to random people around the net. It was fairly well written and not obfuscated, so it didn’t trigger much in the way of spam filters. (The great irony is that by misspelling and breaking up words to get past filters, spammers are making it easier for people to spot, making themselves look horribly unprofessional — would you really trust the product from someone selling “druuugs?” — and creating new, definite spam signs. When you see 10 drug names all misspelled with strange symbols, you know it’s either a spammer or a 14-year-old IRC junkie trying to be L337.)
They even made the effort to include a full plain-text equivalent alongside the HTML version, for the benefit of people who don’t trust or can’t read HTML mail.
And that brings me to the funny part, this statement from the plain-text version:
If your e-mail software does not support html, please click here.
Two problems: aside from violating W3C QA guidelines on link text, it makes no sense, because there’s nothing to click on!
They tried. They really tried. But they forgot to ask whether I actually wanted to be on their mailing list. (Oh, and the “click here” thing was funny.)