Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it
- Reference: 1653648251
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/27/something_for_the_weekend_/
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That's nice. I knew I was lacking something in the footwear department. A fine pair of bobby dazzlers, no doubt.
No, that can't be right. Let me run it through another translation app. Ah, how about this?
[1]
WE BRING ENGLISH TO YOU!
[2]
[3]
This makes more sense: it must be trying to sell English language lessons. It's at the top of a message I keep receiving but cannot understand. The original text is:
İNGİLİZCEYİ AYAĞINIZA GETİRİYORUZ !
[4]
I am ashamed to admit it but my command of Turkish leaves much to be desired. Thank goodness we have the likes of DeepL and Google Translate to bring Turkish to our feet!
The fact that I keep receiving this invitation over and over again to learn English means it is spam.
I certainly hope it is. If it isn't, it could be that the messages are coming from a consortium of [5]SFTW readers and Register sub-editors who reckon I could do with a refresher course. Why they'd do this in Turkish remains a mystery. Maybe it's a sub-editor in-joke, in which case, I hope they're reading this right now and thinking “KAHRETSIN! KEŞFEDİLDİK!”
[6]
Until this recent deluge of unwanted mail from Turkish TEFL podiatrists, along with another Turkish organization's obsessive campaign that I should buy a list of companies on a USB stick, it was as if spammers had all but given up on me.
Incoming junk mail had dwindled to a trickle, not even received daily any more. I had even grown rather fond of the increasingly rare and desperate remaining ads for sleeping pills, tawdry attempts to dump malware by asking me to open Excel attachments, and those enigmatic bi-monthly messages containing nothing but an obviously dodgy URL sent from the hotmail address of a colleague who died eight years previously.
I had begun to wonder if the spammers had blocked my email address. How dare they? Oh, I felt so unwanted!
This is a far cry from the bad old days of the late 1990s. Back then, I was receiving spam in insane quantities: literally hundreds on a daily basis. When I asked my ISP, run by a friend, what he could do about it, he responded by exclaiming "Egads!" He'd taken a look and found that his server's anti-spam filter was already diverting and shredding thousands of such shit intended for me every day before it even reached my inbox.
Until then, I had been largely protected by sticking with in-house corporate messaging and BBS-based email. I don't remember ever receiving a single unsolicited mail, let alone repeated ads, on CIX, CompuServe or Lotus Notes. It was only when I got my first ISP-provided address that it blew up. The only thing that kept me going was that I knew it was much, much worse for those sad bastards who thought it would be cool to join AOL.
It was in the late 1990s, if I remember correctly, that internet activists got together to compile lists of IP addresses that had become notorious sources of spam which they then shared with ISPs. This method was successful for ooh, I dunno, about two seconds. Often it just hamstrung innocent mail servers which had been temporarily hijacked by a spammer spoofing the domain with made-up reply addresses.
With the turn of the Millennium came the introduction of content filtering and NLP. Robots started reading all our messages and making educated guesses as to whether the content might be spam. In my experience, what this means is allowing all the spam to enter your inbox unhindered while adding "***SPAM***" in the subject line of every valid message that you do want to receive.
If someone could work out how to invert this method, they'd deserve a Nobel Prize.
Twenty years on and this seems to remain the predominant anti-spam method. Other methods have come on board, from better sender identification, outbound protection and SMTP callback verification to asking people to use disposable email aliases. None work well enough alone, so organizations such as SpamAssassin take a hybrid approach of multiple methods when assigning numerical scores to suspected spam.
A highlight was when checksum-based filtering was all the rage. This identified spam by looking for similarity in the text content of the messages, which kind of makes sense. While it encouraged some spammers to try to get around it by stuffing messages with uniquely randomized nonsense text, it produced an all-too-brief window of creativity from the Far East.
The late noughties, for me, was the age of Korean Spam. Entirely constructed from graphics and using no live text at all, spam from South Korea was wild, inventive, hideously gorgeous and retina-burningly colorful. I used to receive shitloads of it and found it utterly adorable. I have [7]sung the praises of Korean spam in this column on a previous occasion and while my Google+ web pages devoted to the phenomenon have long since evaporated, I still have my collection safe and sound in the Dabbs vault.
As the 20-teens approached, though, my spam folder saw less and less action. I put this down to the rise of commercial reputation management as an offshoot of SEO. There will always be spammers, but grown-ups have learnt there are more profitable and less damaging ways to sell stuff. Hybrid anti-spam filters began making finer judgements on the nature of incoming email using a huge range of criteria.
Well, they might be. All I know is that following a catastrophic failure by my long-time domain and email host about a year ago, I switched provider in a huff and that's when the spam came back. At least it's easily identified and shuffled away into a Junk folder before I even notice it.
But now everything is backwards. In t'old days, I used to have to prune my inbox to get rid of the spam. Today, I have to trawl through my Junk folder to pull out all the valid messages. The system thinks everything is spam. Messages from people in my contacts list? ***SPAM***! Electricity and mobile phone bills? ***SPAM***! It also has a strong conviction that press releases are spam too, although it may be just having joke with me about that.
Or not. I recently wrote a brief reply to an incoming press release. Later that day, I received an automated message to say that my reply had been rejected by the recipient's email server because it had identified the content as spam. Once again, I felt so unwanted. All I'd written was "Thank you. Could you send me more information, please?"
The content that they had identified as spam was, of course, their original email that I had automatically quoted underneath: i.e. the press release they had written and sent to me in the first place.
[8]Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?
[9]Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?
[10]Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours
[11]On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…
All I want is a spam filter that keeps out all those stupid repeated ads for roofers in Oregon who are "ready to come to your front door" even though my front door is 6,000km away. Not one that's so paranoid that even a note from Mme D gets given the ***SPAM*** treatment.
Let in the good stuff. Let in the right stuff. And for God's sake, let the Korean spam back in. We could all do with a laugh right now. ®
[12]Youtube Video
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He remembers a period a long while back when he used to receive a lot of spam written in Russian. This was before machine translation was freely available so he never did find out what it was for. Maybe they were roofers too. More at [13]Autosave is for Wimps and [14]@alidabbs .
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[5] https://search.theregister.com/?q=%22something+for+the+weekend%22&site=
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YpD1oIWc-tyIRrciQCmPBwAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/14/something_for_the_weekend/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/29/something_for_the_weekend_/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/04/something_for_the_weekend/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/07/something_for_the_weekend/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/24/something_for_the_weekend/
[12] https://youtu.be/lgmWr872oF4
[13] https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com
[14] https://twitter.com/alidabbs
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "Pole Emploi"
By phone. Always a prerecorded message.
Fate - tempt it and ...
Please do not tempt fate. You may find yourself on the wrong side.
Please do tempt fate. You may find yourself on the wrong side.
See, doesn't matter what you do. You die, no matter what. You die of suffocation or you die of starvation. Choose your poison carefully. Filters, antidote and air available upon request. Only $9.95.
Spam = all time low
I get a couple dozen a week, 99% go where they are supposed to go. I have a bigger problem, people giving my email addy as theirs, either by mistake by them, or the bank or insurance company who had to transcribe from a paper form. Roy, if you're reading, I'm getting all your credit card billing reminders, you should pay your bill! And Donna, I doubt you're reading, but I'm not interested in the community production of "Annie Get your Gun". And Delores, I definitely don't want to join the Home Owners Association...
Re: Spam = all time low
"people giving my email addy as theirs, either by mistake by them, or the bank or insurance company who had to transcribe from a paper form"
I get daily emails from Costco and Birkenstock for the same reason. Maybe it wasn't a mistake, but an asterisk next to the email field and the end user's way of diverting the marketing spam....
A little Spam is useful
If I log into my webmail after a few hours and there is nothing there, I do start to worry that emails aren't getting through, a couple of spam emails is actually reassuring!
My biggest problem is big companies sending me emails I want, that get through the filters but look to me very like spam or fishing. I've lost count of the number of companies that send emails from 'Sales' or 'Customer Support' with either no 'Subject' or one that looks highly suspicious.
Was an exchange admin once.
Which took me through a jaunt to find a solution to spam.
Greylisting works, but only if the ne'er-do-wells used a nonstandard SMTP server. Most of the time they just hijack somebody else's server to peddle their tat.
RBL etc as offered by Spamhaus is only effective up to a point, until they get a bulletproof host in order to peddle their tat.
I also had a look at Bayesian filtering, and it do work, but it get stuffed up should the ne'er-do-wells include reams of text from Project Gutenberg in their peddling emails.
Farmed Exchange out to somebody else and made it their problem.
Never again will I look at being an Exchange admin - it is a good system, but it is getting increasingly stressful, and I don't have time for that sort of stress in my life.
Currently our email is on Office365, and things do look good. There's the odd spammy mail coming through, but so far, soooooo much betterer.
"until they get a bulletproof host"
That just means their servers won't be taken down, not that they can escape blacklists.
my current favourite spam filter is the one thunderbird uses. it has decided that all my google calendar emails are spam.
and yahoo comes a close 2nd, as it won't allow me to configure the spam filter and i have to go see what is caught in it every day.
Total number of spam emails received over past year - about 3
Total number of spam emails received according to yahoo - 3000 or so. Including ONE of the ones above.
Total number of spam emails received according to thunderbird - 1000 or so. Including ONE of the real spams.
Thunderbird is indeed pretty good.
That said, I programmed my own spam filter. Granted, all incoming messages hit my Inbox, but then I clicked on Filter and 99% of the time what was left was genuine messages that were for me.
What were my filters ? Check this out :
1) From domain does not match ReplyTo domain - that's pretty simple to check and a golden rule AFAIC
2) From country is not a country I know people from - Russia, looking at you
3) From does not match somebody who I have already accepted mail from - if I don't know you, why should I waste my time ?
4) Subject contains wierd character combinations - nobody puts [(D:!!] in a subject
5) Body contains links to domains other than the From domain - if you pretend to be from Microsoft, your link better point to a Microsoft-held domain
6) Body contains attachments with names that end in .exe - nope, nobody sends legitimate executables by email without prior warning
Ok, there have been a few occasions where a new "colleague" got his mail sent to the spam box, but I can recover that.
More often than not, these rules have been more than sufficient to not waste my time reading a mail with a subject like "Re:
Thunderbird does a good job, but really, I had something that was almost as efficient and didn't cost me a week of development.
Of course, that was when I still got my mail via Lotus Notes.
Now I have to use Thunderbird. The occasional spam gets through, but I can recognize it almost instantly.
Of course, not using Outlook helps a lot in preventing unwanted hijacking.
"Now I have to use Thunderbird. The occasional spam gets through, but I can recognize it almost instantly."
I have to agree, after, maybe 15 years of Gmail and their absolutely shit web interface, and also after someone (yourself maybe) advising me to go thunderbird, I feel way more relaxed having just done that !
It works well and is auto-learning SPAM rapidly, to the point, on the rare occasion I go to the TB spam folders, I say "holly cr*p", so much already handled by TB after 6 months !!
Korean Spam sounds yummy, I'm imagining barbecued spam and some nice spicy noodles.
Junk mail filters are incredibly dumb these days IME. Anyone who likes the outdoors will know that hiking/walking/camping gear isn't cheap, and especially if you add the word "lightweight" in front of it. Signing up for company newsletters usually gets you a first order discount. Usually the "click here to confirm subscription" email gets through, then the actual newsletter doesn't. Emails from confused.com get through, but emails from the car insurance company I've just signed up to get blocked
Mmmm spam ggangpoongi. Can I get that with a side order of kimchi and a bibimbap?
Any non-Korean that claims to like Kimchi should be immediately expelled from the conversation...128,526 varieties that all taste like acidic sh**
Yes, I have tried the real thing in Seoul and Inchon. Several times actually as initially I could not believe people would sell stuff like that as food but clearly they can and do
Not really spam but...
... I keep receiving emails which are intended for other people. It seems all the people in the US sharing with me the same last name and the first letter of the first name think it's appropriate to give my gmail address instead of theirs. Now I've got access to plenty of websites which don't think it's necessary to check a mail address before giving full access based on it.
Re: Not really spam but...
I too am getting lots of emails from people with the same, or nearly same name as me.
Sad thing is, they seem to lead much more interesting and exciting lives than I do.
Tempting as it is to reply and mess up my namesake's social life, I just delete the emails. Gave up on trying to inform the senders that they'd got the wrong address.
Re: Not really spam but...
I get this with Gmail. I've had a firstname.surname@ address since the days of invitations to join. A vintage Gmail address.
Some stupid b in the USA used to give it out as hers. God knows why (though we share a name and she uses the male spelling of "Terry" not "Terri")
So I used to get lots of emails about dress fitting, Lady's tennis lessons, dinner menus and so forth.
At first I used to politely but firmly inform the sender that I was several thousand miles away, on a different continent and male. But as time wore on I got more and more fed up with this and my replies got less and less polite. Eventually I became incredibly rude, or told the sender to cancel my membership and so forth, without bothering to say their email was obviously meant for someone else. The embarrassment seems to have stopped her. I seldom get any now.
I am getting a lot of Spam from version of that address. Gmail isn't case sensitive and ignores the dot. It comes from Firstnamesurname@gmail.com No dot or second capital. All the spam comes from just that one version. So they've scraped it from somewhere. And the idiots who pay them for that kind of message get as much for their money as they deserve.
Snail mail can be just as bad
11 years on from moving into this house, I still regularly recieve mortgage statements and legal documents related to other properties the previous owners still own. You try to contact the sender, but you can't get anything changed, as you are not the person they are sending to.
I've even tried contacting the Information Commissioners Office on multiple occassions but get no response to email and web-form.
Re: Snail mail can be just as bad
Have you tried putting "RTS - not at this address" on the envelope and sticking it in a post box? I have had some success with that method, though not 100%.
Re: Snail mail can be just as bad
No just put deceased return to sender on the envelope and pop it back in the postbox.
Note in my case that was actually true regarding the previous owner of the house. But I have used it with junk mail addressed to myself.
Re: Snail mail can be just as bad
"RTS - not at this address"
"RTS - Deceased" usually produces better *) results.
*) Better for me as the snail mail usually stops after that.
My chosen anti-spam filter now catches close to 100% of all spam, and it learns any it misses if I flag them for next time (likewise, if I flag any false positives it mistakenly intercepts).
The vast majority look like this.
--
--
--
Greetings to you.
This is to inform you that the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the United Nations [UN] is compensating all the
scammed victims $330.000.00 United States Dollars.
Your name and email address was mentioned to the United States Secret Service by one of the Scammers who was arrested.
Meanwhile this Compensation department has been mandated by the IMF and the United Nations to deliver your compensation
funds to you through your current residents home address which is 100 % Guarantee for delivery to you as one of the scammed
victim.
Get back to us with your fully details such as.
Your name......
Your occupation......
Your phone number......
Your age......
Your ID card....
These information are needed before the delivery takes place. Thanks for cooperate with us.
Whatsapp number 15407530466
Text.....+13602154417
CONTACT EMAIL....imfd762{at}gmail.com
MRs Gloria young.
I'll never understand either how they think they'll get away with it, or why they sometimes get responses.
Disposable Email Addresses are working well for me and have done for well over a decade. I run my own mail server so can operate a default allow (only needing my attention on the rare occasion when an address 'goes bad') and most importantly can filter by RCPT TO rather than the highly untrustable 'TO:' field.
What's occasionally interesting is to check my server logs. Email addresses that I ceased to use years ago are still getting spam sent to them even though they've been rejecting incoming email all that time. Apparently spammers are ignorant or don't care. Probably the latter since they can charge marketing gits for those addresses even though they are useless. Two shitty groups of people kicking each other - works for me.
Mind you on the subject of shitty people one also to wonder at those trying to break into my server:
21/3/2022 15:57:43.013 - Client:62.74.7.40 State:RcptTo Action:Reject Rule:Reject general crap Size:0 MAILFROM:b054a60fc9eb086@???? Recipients:(b054a60fc9eb086@?????)
There might be someone called 'b054a60fc9eb086' living somewhere but they haven't asked me to create an account for them yet. And how amusing that they are apparently emailing themselves.. The joys of SMTP.
Hmmm. This is an interesting one. I remember that there was one company I got so fed up with that I changed my email address to something different...
21/3/2022 19:47:52.656 - Client:178.202.191.181 State:RcptTo Action:Reject Rule:Reject general crap Size:0 MAILFROM:spamming.assholes@???? Recipients:(spamming.assholes@?????)
"Pole Emploi"
Are you not getting bombarded by scammers, via email and phone, trying to steal the contents of your Compte Personnel de Formation, Mr Dabbs?!?