While I generally find the ways that spammers devise to beat spam filters to be quite creative and amusing, the recent trend of using random names has been a little unsettling for me in the last few days.
I’ve had to look at a couple of e-mails that I had almost no doubt were spam, but they were “from” names that were identical to the names of people I knew from high school, although from a year or two outside my graduating class. In other words, I had to look. Not suprisingly, these familiar names were offering great deals on vi*gra.
Speaking of spam, I recommend that you take a look at Fred Langa’s recent e-mail experiment that suggests that as many as 40% of legitimate e-mail messages may be filtered out by today’s spam filtering software.
These results back up my argument that spam filters have destroyed the trust we used to have in e-mail. Is the cure worse than the problem? Will I be calling you to see whether you got my e-mail?

Permalink: Eerie Spam

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2004 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.