E-Mail

Here is a screen shot of one of my Yahoo! inboxes. "Spamguard is on", it says somewhere. This leads me to think about spam. Another reason I'm thinking about spam is because one of the mailing lists I get is heavily preoccupied with spam filtering right now. What is this thing about spam? As you can see below, I have 678 mails still waiting for me that I can't be bothered to read.

 

 

Why is it that I can smell spam from a mile but the Yahoo filter can't?

Why does spam get sent at all?

Hmm. Questions, questions. Does anyone actually like to get spam? Listening to people, they don't, but looking at some of the stuff online, plenty click anyway. I suppose if you really wanted to buy viagra, you wouldn't even know where to go to get it. Without clicking on that enticing thing in your inbox, that is. And it was shown that quite a few "top business men" (whatever that might be) were on the books of viagra sellers who were known spammers.

So first off, if nobody ever clicked on the links in the spam, there would be no spam. Because it would not be an efficient business proposal. It costs quite a lot of money to obtain lists of valid email addresses.

This is the dichotomy. Nobody likes spam. Internet Service Providers don't like spam. Their customers don't like spam. But Russian bandits are rolling in it because lots of people buy stuff through spammy emails. Nigerian lowlife get to the bottom of American widows' life savings through spam. Korean swines get your PayPal passwords through spam.

Spam needs to be stopped, they say. There's an awful lot of people who would disagree. But the fact is that the stopping-effort has made life harder for the continuation-fans. (small thought here -- if people got more spam, would they recognise it more easily? I win several lotteries a day, so I don't fall for it, but the guy who just gets the one lottery "win" might fall for it more easily?)

The Spam filter used by Yahoo! doesn't work. (Almost) All the mail I get is spam, but of every 100 mails, only 10 are classed spam. Looking at the picture above: "normal" people don't send pdf's, "normal" job offers don't come online, anything that announces a price in dollars is irrelevant in poundland, I buy things when I decide I need/want them, not when someone else offers them, all greeting cards are viruses, ALL CAPS is spam, and I am not a bloke so the viagra is wasted on me. If it's URGENT, they should have telephoned. If they don't know my number, they're spammers.

That's just the subject titles. If the recipient isn't acually me, it's spam. If the return address is not the same as the sender's, it's spam. Well at least to my mind, it should be classed as spam. If it was sent from a dynamic IP address, it's spam. If it comes from Yahoo mail or Hotmail, it's spam.

But if people would just stop clicking on the bloody things, the whole spam problem would go away...

BTW the Yahoo! Mail virus scanner is soooo brilliant I use it to send viruses from one VM to another. Unzipped even.