Monthly Archives: January 2005

I mentioned I set up some new spam traps a few weeks ago. This amusing disclaimer appeared in one of them over the weekend:

You have received this message for one of the following reasons:
1) By accident.
2) Someone else is using your email address without your knowledge.
3) You have responded to one of our free gifts/courses.
4) You have sent an e-mail to one of our email addresses.
5) You are a member of one of the safelists, by doing so, you have agreed to receive this message

Heh. I like #1. They accidentally harvested the address from a web page and added it to their lists. “You know, I was surfing the web, and I left my autospam-assistant program running, and one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, it was spamming you.”

Of course, the rest of the disclaimer is funny too, if you’re familiar with the history of spam legislation. Continue reading →

The Register has published an interview with a link spammer. Link spamming is more like vandalism than junk mail, but the spammers still fall back on the old “It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments” BS. Do we need to put up a digital “No Trespassing” sign? Does anyone really think the spammers would honor it?

The interviewee explains that “it’s nothing personal,” a cliché you probably can’t even get into a script without acknowledging its triteness. You know, I’m sure if someone breaks into my house and uses my printer to make a few hundred posters, it’s nothing personal either…but it doesn’t justify it.

(via The War on Spam)

A while back I received a strange spam containing a quantum physics paper. At the time I wasn’t sure what to make of it, although someone suggested it might just be a randomly mailed document sent by a virus.

Someone else who received it referred to it as Idea Spam—spam designed not to sell or advertise a product, but to promote an idea. Basically, spam as a meme vector.

Another person characterized the paper (or rather, the paper’s author) as a crank. Apparently it’s not unusual for pseudo-scientists to indiscriminately send their “findings” to anyone they think might listen. My favorite quote from this discussion:

i heard that one professor (i can’t remember whom) has a folder in his cabinet titled “public relations” where he stuffs things from these maniacs. when he was asked why he didn’t just label the folder “nut cases,” he replied that “then they’d get mad. this way, they will feel like i might look at it later and just go away.”

And so the mystery is solved.