Sunday, May 17, 2009
Original spam
We all get spam from time to time. What I mean is the unsolicited mail of course, not the canned meat product. An annoying thing, responsible for a lot of lost hours for a lot of people, and also for 0,2% of the world wide CO2 emission, due to the power consumed when treating those mails.
Luckily there are some good tools to stop spam. In fact, the first one is the human factor. Spam exists only because some people, even if it's one out of ten thousand or less, actually buys a product advertised in a spam mail. If the senders of spam wouldn't get any money out of it, there would be no profit in sending it.
But other methods involve blacklisting, white listing, and more recently, greylisting. Blacklisting is not very efficient; it involves putting "bad" addresses on a list, and not accepting mail from those.
Up to white-listing then. It's good technique, where you only accept mail from people you know. The disadvantage is that you need to add users as soon as you want to receive mail from them, and you not always know their address.
What I am currently using is greylisting. With this method, the white-list is made automatically, so it is very efficient. However, you still need to check the spam folder to see if there are no false positives. Luckily, it is very simple to recognise spam. Just read the subject line, and you know it. Here's a list with recent spam subjects:
- Female Odrgasm
- Making a Female Orgasm is Essential Fpor a Healthy sexual Relationship
- Makeing Txhe First Move - 1 Line That Works Every Time
- Guide To Better oLve Making
Note the spelling errors, made in the hopes that spam filters that use filters with words do not notice them.
But his line really made me laugh, and you'll have to admit this usually is not something a spam aims at:
We do not have time to change subjects every day, please buy our productss
This really is what spam is about: sending e-mail with subject lines that might tempt people to open the mail and then click the link, so that in the end, they buy whatever product (Viagra, fake Rolex, ...) is actually advertised.
posted by Vince | 11:26 AM
0 Reacties:
Post a Comment