Portraits of Spammers
It’s been a long week, so enjoy some art (and spam). Next week we’ll get back to discussing the many faults of Gmail. And senders. And receivers. And, well, everyone has faults. And email is Dead. Tabs killed it.
I’m finding out that email address harvesting off websites is alive and well on the Internet. We have a rotating address on the contact page, which does get harvested but usually the spam is attempting to sell me blog related services. I didn’t expect to get a very different collection of emails to the address I posted here. I’m quite surprised that address is getting a completely different type of spam from the contact address.
The one thing that harvesters appear to have in common is sending CAN SPAM violating email. Both the contact address and the questions address get lots of mail that is in violation of US (and California) law. One of these days I might get bored enough to file a suit against one of them and blog about it.
MessageLabs released their monthly report on email threats yesterday. Many media outlets picked up and reported that 41% of spam was from a the Rustock botnet.
Other highlights from the report include:
Earlier this week I received an email to a work address I retired 4 or 5 years ago. The from and subject lines alone were enough to make me laugh and decide I had to blog about this particular spammer.
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