Saturday, December 16, 2006

Useless spam

Well, spam is useless anyway, but I seem to be getting a lot of spam recently that has no links, no images, no URLs, nothing. People who send spam, I thought, were generally trying to sell you something - buy my stolen / copied watches, buy my illegal drugs, buy penny stocks (that have already peaked) in my company, check out my porn web site, stuff like that. But if the message contains no way for you to get to their web site, how do they make money off of it?

My family web site has a guest book. Every couple of weeks or so, I get a couple of spam postings, which I promptly delete. This morning I got one from "Bill" (uh-huh) which said (this was the entire text of the message): "Hello, nice site look this:".

Bill, if you're reading this blog, I assure you that I really wanted to "look this", but there was no "this" to "look". My interest was piqued, and then disappointment washed over me like I was a Senators fan during the playoffs. Most of the people who visit perrow.ca are my family, so in order to spare them that level of despair, I deleted your message. I'm sorry, but I have to do what's best for my family.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yep, I totally agree.

I have to ask the same question - what is the point of sending out an email that is so obviously an attempt to get you to go to some website / buy a product, but is so poorly written and/or garbled that it doesn't even make sense?

And now they (the spammers) have obviously loss even more brain cells because they are forgetting to add in the links to their site/product/whatever.!

I've been running my family's email through spamassissin and a few other additional rules (a perl script of course! :) and now I catch 99.99% of the spam that comes into our mail boxes and haven't had a single false positive. Its pretty easy to catch their dim witted messages - anything that spamassissin doesn't catch is easily caught by just looking for [snip: rules omitted]! :-)

Yappa said...

Maybe they're trying to get people to hit reply.

I get spam every week or two in the comments on my blog. They sometimes almost fool me... things like "Great blog. Thanks. See my reply here" and "here" takes you to a site that's selling penny stocks. I chose to not use word verification because some of my relatives would not be able to handle it, I think. Not that they ever comment anyway.