E-mail spam (including Trojan and virus messages), instant-message spam (“spim”), blog-comment spam, postal “bulk business mail,” and any other kind of unwanted, underhanded, and/or intrusive advertising. Also covers viruses, worms, and other malware.
I received an odd newsletter e-mail this morning. Odd because it looked like a perfectly legitimate newsletter, but it was from an outfit calling itself IDG Connect and claiming that I’m a “valued customer.” I’d never heard of the company before this, so far as I know, so I did some research. It’s hard to …
CAPTCHAs, the automated tests that are meant to prevent spam-bots from overrunning free e-mail services and comment forms, have been defeated. What’s next? Hopefully not something like this… I tried it three times, and only succeeded twice. Statistics also indicate that it wouldn’t work too well — there are less than 30 variations, so even …
After one month of using it, I’m very happy to confirm that SpamBayes (via the ThunderBayes plug-in for Thunderbird) is absolutely as awesome as I’d heard it could be! The scoring is so accurate that I decided a while back to let it automatically delete messages with 100% spam probability as read, so that I …
One of my sisters sent me a very interesting optical-illusion e-mail recently. I enjoyed it quite a bit. But like most such messages that I see, it was forwarded, and had several different headers, and all of the e-mail addresses it had ever been sent to were intact and visible in them. People… please, please, …
After several days of using ThunderBayes/SpamBayes, I’m happy to report that it’s just as awesome as it was rumored to be! 😀 Even better, I’ve been able to fix one of the problems that I had with setting it up (the multiple-accounts bug). I sent the code changes to Daniel Miller, the original ThunderBayes developer, …
As reported yesterday, I’m now using ThunderBayes/SpamBayes to filter spam. I manually classified several hundred recent spam messages, and a roughly-equal number of recent personal (“ham”) messages. So far, it hasn’t had a single false positive on either side, and most of the “unsure” classifications have been of legitimate commercial messages (that do resemble spam …
Thunderbird’s built-in spam filter is pretty good, more accurate (and a lot easier to set up and use) than several others I’ve tried, but even so it’s accuracy still leaves something to be desired. I don’t get anywhere near as much spam now as I used to, but roughly half of my daily e-mail is …
Continue reading ‘Getting SpamBayes/ThunderBayes Working (Under Linux)’ »
I’ve pretty much given up posting the spam and scam messages I receive here, because there’s very little new in them, just the same tired rehashes of the same tired fake offers. But this one is notable because it’s one of the few actual “money mule” e-mails I’ve ever gotten. I know I shouldn’t have …
Continue reading ‘“Transactions specialist – flexi-time contract hire”’ »
In 1997 I set up an e-mail account to support several software products I’d written for my (now-former) company. Because customers and potential customers needed to be able to find it easily, I put it on the company web page too. Predictably, it became an instant spam magnet. I couldn’t trust automated spam filters (when …
No, I’m not talking about blogs about cars. I’m talking about pseudo-blogs that are obviously completely automated, collecting entries about certain subjects from other blogs and linking to them. Geek Drivel has had three such hits so far; I’m letting them stay linked for now, while I try to figure out what their purpose is. …