Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

This weekend my Contact page got spammed. It’s now rewritten and using a few blacklists (including Akismet) among other techniques to eliminate spam. Should be much better now. I also think the handling of attachments should be better.
The spam appeared to be from a botnet, based on the fact that no 2 [...]

And the spamming of Google Earth begins. I guess it was only a matter of time.

I’ve said before that I had a belief that spammers are stupid…. now I’ve got solid proof.

eBay and banks really need implement SPF, Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys. There I said it.
I see quite a few Phishing attacks every day. And just about all of them aren’t caught by SpamAssassin. Technically they aren’t spam, so that does make sense. But what bothers me is that [...]

Interestingly I got some spam today that had some interesting code. Both AppleWorks and MS Word seem to be used by the author. Included in this post are some excerpts from this email that I found interesting:

There’s been a lot of buzz lately over AOL and Yahoo charging to email their customers. I think this quote most likely will end up being the future:

“AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don’t receive the e-mail that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they’ll be told, ‘it’s AOL’s fault,’ [...]

I’m almost convinced now that the majority of stuff SpamAssassin misses isn’t really spam, but phishing messages. I think it’s time for SpamAssassin to start considering detecting it. Perhaps take a look at mscott’s good work for Mozilla Thunderbird.
Odds are lots of that detection stuff, will also detect spam slipping through by other [...]

It’s pretty well known at this time that a rather large sum of Spam comes through regular ISP’s. There is a rather large debate on how to get rid of them. Some ISP’s just ignore it. Some block port 25. But is there a better way?
I’m going to propose the following:

A [...]

Well, you knew it would happen. I got a pathetic attempt at a typical nigerian 419 scam email, with a Tsunami twist. Yea, that’s right. Sick isn’t it? For those interested it’s copied here. I’m sure someones going to fall for this… sadly.

Considering our overburdened legal system, and understaffed courthouses, this is really pretty wrong:

A federal judge refused to accept a guilty plea Tuesday from a former America Online software engineer accused of stealing 92 million e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers.

So he can’t plead guilty to a crime he admits to committing because the Judge [...]