Sometimes I check the spam folder just in case actual (even important) email from a human being who is not trying to sell me (and the millions of others in that valuable set of email addresses) something I don’t need has been snagged by the filter. More rarely, I open the odd spam message from the spam folder. (By the way, could Gmail please stop suggesting Spam recipes while I’m there? It makes the experience even ickier.)
Tonight, I found spam advertising “real, genuine degrees that include Bachelors, Masters, MBA and Doctorate Degrees. They are fully verifiable and certified transcripts are also available.” In 4 to 6 weeks! With no study required! It’s almost like they have no freakin’ idea what I do for a living.
But what made it art was the cryptic sentence and a half way down at the bottom of the email message:
towards him with his wand. I need to Disillusion you.
And lo! I was disillusioned.
That quote looks to be from a Harry Potter book.
What I want to know is how are the spamsters getting the address in the first place? I opened a Gmail account using one of my ten billion invites and started receiving spam even though I’d never used it anywhere!
The diploma-mill spam feature I love most is the all-caps shouting that the degree is from an UNACCREDITED institution, as if the fact that the degree is worthless is a selling point.
Thomas: They probably used a dictionary attack. (To: aaa@gmail, aab@gmail, etc…)
Sometimes the nonsense can be faintly entertaining, but spam really is the mildew of the cybernetic ecosystem.
Thomas:
As one my coworkers who studies spam told me, while scolding me for choosing a six-character username: the most common way of creating spam mailing lists is to go to a host with lots of users, and send a message to every possible username with 8 or less characters. Apparently, a 9-character username will cut your spam by an incredibly huge margin. (I’ve got a backup address on gmail with a 16 character usename, in 6 months of having it, it’s gotten a total of 50-odd spams; whereas my “markcc” account gets 50 spams per hour on a slow day.
I’ve always emptied my spam folder every day, after going through checking things first. But recently I realized that everything in the spam folder really was just spam (e.g. nothing was miscategorized) and thus I’ve just let it fill up. Since June 1, I’ve received 7765 spam messages.
I guess you failed your saving throw.
Bob