I’ve talked alot about email spam here, but I get com­ment span at the Life of Brian too. Any­one who has a blog (or for that mat­ter a web page that allows com­ments) know what I’m talk­ing about.

There are sev­eral ways to fight it and here at LOB we use three dif­fer­ent meth­ods. Firstly, com­ment­ing is closed on any post that is older than 14 days because the spam­mers love to seek out the posts that are off the front page, so you won’t notice them. The sec­ond line of defense is the very first time some­one com­ments, they have to have their com­ment approved before it gets pub­lished. This keeps the spam­mers out because it usu­ally comes from addresses like ariana_monet_zc@xrea.com or scarlett.mathasi@oyps.com, but the next time they com­ment it goes right out there. The third way is using a plug-in that comes with word­press called Akismet. It won’t like most email spam fight­ers by com­par­ing the incom­ing comment’s email address, IP address and look­ing for key words and phrases to dump them into queue where I can review them. In May it caught 34, in June 35 and so far this month 28. Some­times I think I don’t get many com­ments here, so maybe I should strip the links and email addresses and post them because they can be quite inter­est­ing. This morn­ing I had four:

You need to seri­ously write some more about this.
Com­ing right up!

A gink begins cut­ting his wis­dom teeth the ini­tially with­out surcease he bites eccen­tric more than he can chew.
Of course he does.

You cover to be present a self-motivated per­son who is will­ing to bulge down and cause through the work­load of every cal­en­dar day. You cover to be present prompt to take on lot in life of in rank, you cover to be present will­ing to hear a ton of con­cepts and tips and tricks with the inten­tion of want sort you thriv­ing by the side of mak­ing money online, and if you sort out all of with the inten­tion of, at that moment you want start to go with a com­plete stage rev­enue upcom­ing made known of this.
Huh?!?

Thanks for the awe­some post!
You are very welcome…

I had no less than 5 virus infected emails that started with that sub­ject fol­lowed by 15 alphanu­meric char­ac­ters in my work inbox this morn­ing. I have been get­ting 1 ran­domly for the last cou­ple of weeks, but today was a big influx and it reminded me I hadn’t writ­ten about spam in awhile…

How true, some­times I *am* totally lost:
Won­der where u are from bbogardus@asco.com (that is my old email address here at work)

Your salary check is prob­a­bly drawn on a check from Bank of Amireca:
Work Today Paied Tomor­row from Mad.money@FREEAMAZINGHEALTH.INFO

Most pop­u­lar spam sub­ject was a tie with 4 each:
Heavy Lift­ing made 50% Lighter, Safer, Eas­ier &
New ARM & HAMMER Whiten­ing Booster — Try it Now

And from the male inse­cu­rity depart­ment:
Make your man­hood tuned from 2 senders
Blow her with your hor­mones from akosuabelden@asco.com
We offer the best alarm-clocks for your small buddy down there from punkerlg@hhh…hhh
and my favorite
Fer­til­ize your male tree from ayomidebanvard@asco.com

Actual emails caught in my work­place spam trap.

Half the time twice the erec­tion from seseiopo@HDSMARKETING.COM

Fan­tas­tic growth guar­an­teed from Gabriele-ckmannin@FICAEL.COM.BR

Nurs­ing home abuse! from return@newerpossibilities.com

The biggest mean­est bad daddy from lowie-twuots@CRAIGHOMECARE.COM

Wham Bam Thank You Pam from egarekor@BILLPAXTON.NET

Enlarge­ment for dum­mies from rpnevjiw_1977@VALEXKOREA.COM

Give her the best time from ediool_1963@GLITC.ORG

Hark­ness pri­vate foun­da­tion from Kclpv@adelphia.com

Seduc­tive pro­posal of health­care. from funna_1967@Umica.plus.com

Paris loves it hard from sadnesse_1953@SUPERVIELLE.COM.AR

Unleash your titan from Heiko-fluitert@14WFIE.com

I haven’t writ­ten about spam in a long while. Not because I’ve stopped get­ting it (there is as much chance of that hap­pen­ing as there was of me win­ning the Miata raf­fle the other day), but because it has become rou­tine. There hasn’t been any­thing new since I started get­ting spam in kanji.

For a while there 2 months ago the Pos­tini report I get for my work address was telling me it was stop­ping over 200 pieces a day, but now it has fallen to an all time low of around just 25 a day. A few more seem to mak­ing it through the fil­ter though, I get 4 or 5 a day when it used to be 4 or 5 a week. How they are get­ting past is a mys­tery as they are eas­ily rec­og­niz­able as spam. I got one this morn­ing that I can see how it made it by, but for the life of me can not fig­ure on its purpose:

From: Assis­tant [temp5@utlya.com]
Sent: Sun­day, Decem­ber 09, 2007 7:38 PM
To: Bog­a­r­dus, Brian [ASCO/AK]
Sub­ject: Infor­ma­tion, as instructed.

Recipe: Overnight Fruit Salad

Ingredients

1 small head cab­bage, shred­ded (about 5 cups)
1 15oz can pineap­ple chunks, well drained
2 11oz cans man­darin orange sec­tions, drained
2 cups seed­less green grapes
1/3 cups light raisins
1 1/2 cups cubed Edam cheese
1 8oz car­ton lemon yogurt
1 cup dairy sour cream

Instructions :

1. Place cab­bage on bot­tom of large salad bowl.
2. Top with pineap­ple chunks, man­darin orange sec­tions, grapes and raisins. Sprin­kle cheese atop.
3. Com­bine yogurt and sour cream; spread over salad, seal­ing to edge of bowl.
4. Cover and refrig­er­ate for 4 to 24 hours. If desired, gar­nish with lemon and lime twist, curly endive, and a grape.

National Asso­ci­a­tion of Cab­bage Pro­duc­ers rais­ing aware­ness?
Del Monte try­ing to boost sales of canned fruit?
Ter­ror­ists deliv­er­ing a toxin in seed­less green grapes?

Recently Yahoo updated / changed their email and it has resulted in a cou­ple hun­dred per­cent increase of spam deliv­ered to the MMC mail­box. So much so that I won­dered if I had unin­ten­tion­ally shut off their “Spam Guard”, I hadn’t. What is most annoy­ing is that the Club gets so few mails of impor­tance to begin with…

Also, I think I will go ahead and kill the brian@mr-miata.net address as it has been attract­ing lots of spam lately too. I rarely used it any­way. I was going to get cute and try to obfus­cate that email address, but what does it mat­ter if it will no longer exist after tonight. So if you have that email in your address book go ahead and delete it. Try Brian_the_Red with the domain, OK?

Here are some excerpts from a 3-page let­ter that came in the snail mail on Sat­ur­day for my deceased mother-in-law:

Dear Friend:
My name is Dick Holl­man. In Sep­tem­ber 1991 my car was repos­sessed. Bill col­lec­tors were hound­ing me like crazy. I was laid off and unem­ploy­ment ran out. In Octo­ber I received a let­ter telling me how I could earn $800,000.00 any­time I wanted to!!! Of course I was skep­ti­cal, but because I was so des­per­ate, and had noth­ing to lose I gave it a try. In Jan­u­ary 1992, my fam­ily went on a ten day cruise and in Feb­ru­ary, bought an Escalade with cash. This pro­gram works per­fectly as long as every­body is hon­est and enjoy not work­ing again!!! THIS IS NOT A CHAIN LETTER!!! This is a per­fectly legal money mak­ing oppor­tu­nity. Please read the let­ter care­fully, fol­low the instruc­tions EXACTLY!!!!!

Who­ever sent this for­got to advance the dates by a decade when they changed the vehi­cle pur­chased, Escalades weren’t man­u­fac­tured until 1999.

1. Imme­di­ately send $1.00 US funds to each of the 6 names on this page.
Include with you dol­lar a request to be put on their mail­ing list. THIS IS THE CRITICAL STEP THAT MAKES THIS PROGRAM PERFECTLY LEGAL!!!!!

Bold­ing mine, doesn’t just putting this instruc­tion in the let­ter inval­i­date this loophole?

4. Pur­chase a mail­ing list from DATA LINE, THEIR NUMBER IS 1800–497-2912. Ask for a list of oppor­tu­nity seek­ers. This list is $40.00 and comes on address labels ready to go on envelopes. They will ship C.O.D. and take Mas­ter Card and Visa.

Inter­net search­ing reveals no com­pany called DATA LINE that sells mail­ing lists. I also got no hits using a cou­ple of toll free reverse look up direc­to­ries for that num­ber (I was scared to actu­ally call it…) So this is prob­a­bly not a way to scam peo­ple out of $40.

1)Steven Clewis
5453 Stew­art Dr.
Vir­ginia Beach, VA. 23464
…
6)Richard Creamer
Rt. 1 Box 2025
Ray City, GA.31645

The address label, a lick to apply kind, listed Mr. Creamer and that address. So, did Richard actu­ally fol­low the writ­ten instruc­tions in hopes of get­ting $800,000? Or did Steven Clewis have the return address labels printed up along with the

3. Copy or print 200 (or 500 if you are ambi­tious) copies of this 3 page letter.

in hopes of speed­ing up the income? As far as I can tell from my rudi­men­tary inter­net searches, no one by the name of Steven Clewis lives at that address. There were 4 dif­fer­ent names with 4 cor­re­spond­ing, but dif­fer­ent, phone num­bers that I could find listed at 5453 Stew­art Dr.

Any­way, who­ever hoped to profit from this “solic­i­ta­tion to join their mail­ing list” is going to be at least one buck shy of their goal as the let­ter went into our shred­der. Right after I scanned it, so I wouldn’t have to retype these excerpts.

My at-work spam count, that which is caught by the fil­ters, has been hov­er­ing in the mid fifties, but in the last cou­ple of days a half dozen or so of them have slipped by the fil­ter and made it to my inbox. Var­i­ous titles, from var­i­ous inter­nal spoofed email addresses and all with the same inter­nal content.

It is of course rid­dled with extra char­ac­ters in key words that the spam fil­ters would catch. My favorite line is:

Receive the ben­e­fits and admi­ra­tion that comes with a D:iploma!

Just how is a D:iploma dif­fer­ent from a diploma, because I have a diploma and I don’t seem to get many ben­e­fits nor any admi­ra­tion from hav­ing it.

But what wor­ries me most, is there are prob­a­bly hun­dreds of peo­ple out there that actu­ally call the phone num­ber at the bot­tom of the email…

Ever since August/September when I was push­ing 10Gigs of traf­fic and 90% of that was refer­rer spam, I check my stats and raw logs every few days. Using a com­bi­na­tion of pages equal hits and search­ing through the log I find the offend­ing IP address and ban them. So far 152 IP addresses are no longer wel­come. I have a cou­ple of Word­Press plu­g­ins run­ning that are sup­posed to block some of this, but so far I’m not sure they are up to the task. Ban­ning IPs is the only sure­fire way, but it means con­stant dili­gence is required.

Some­thing new has popped up in the access logs, instead of request­ing a GET which loads the page and con­sums band­width, there have been quite a few that are request­ing a HEAD which doesn’t load the page and results in zero band­width usage. Are they being friendly?

Or are they just probe droids look­ing for pages to exploit?

I’m bet­ting on the lat­ter, so they are going on Santa’s Naughty list…

Don­a­van, who’s email address is Washburn@ypo.co.jp, was kind enough to send me a note this morn­ing alert­ing me to a hot stock pick. It is cur­rently trad­ing at 15 cents a share with a 12 month pro­jec­tion of $1!

Founded in Feb­ru­ary 2000, m-Wise has rapidly estab­lished itself as a lead­ing tech­nol­ogy provider with the de facto Ser­vice Deliv­ery Plat­form and related value-added data engines for Mobile Oper­a­tors, Wire­less ASPs, and large con­tent and media providers.

Work­ing closely with lead­ing oper­a­tors, ASPs and con­tent providers, m-Wise is com­mit­ted to take the lead and keep up to date with the lat­est indus­try head­ways in areas as diverse as con­tent man­age­ment and deliv­ery, info­tain­ment, mobile gam­ing and mobile com­mu­nity services.

I know I’m going to go empty my cur­rent 401K por­fo­lio and put it in this com­pany. In a year you will be able to say, “I knew him when.” Thanks again Donavan.

Hey, wait a minute, he sent it to the ASCO global list, every­body knows…

Ever since the last time I wrote about the quan­tity of spam at work seemed to be aver­ag­ing over a hun­dred a day, it quickly fell back down near an aver­age of 50 a day. Well now we have sunk to a new low. Sat­ur­day morning’s sum­mary email reported just 34 mes­sages, Sunday’s had 37 and this morning’s a pal­try 25. The new spam atten­tion get­ter sub­ject is today’s post’s title. I noticed a smat­ter­ing of them ear­lier last week, but it came on strong Sat­ur­day as it was the sub­ject of 14 out of 34 emails. Then it showed up six more times in Sunday’s report, but dis­ap­peared on Monday’s. Is that the end? I’ll let you know when I get back from shop­ping at Walmart…

At a rate of about 70 a day here at work, but I don’t see them, just part of the sub­ject line in my daily digest from Pos­tini. Mostly I just delete that email, but today, one near the top caught my eye: WOW, got laid 3 times this week from francisca.wiley_ky@excite.com. Not that I thought, hey, I should get in on that, but just the two word combo of “got laid.”

A lit­tle over a week ago an anony­mous reader left a well thought out and insight­ful cri­tique of my blog­ging style on my Dahlonega to Home post. He also sug­gested that per­haps I should “make a nota­tion every time I got laid.” Being the smart ass I am, I com­mented back that I already do that on my other blog, briangetslaid.blogspot.com. Of course I had just made up the name on the spot, but being the smart ass I am, I spent the next 15 min­utes actu­ally mak­ing up a blogspot blog by that name. I think I’ll go add that email to it…

I haven’t given a count of my work spam for a while and that is because they have changed to for­mat in which I get the daily spam sand­wich from Pos­tini. It used to come in a spiffy html for­mat­ted email with the total emails right at the top. Now it is in plain text, and they dropped the email count. I have stu­pider things to do with my life than to count them, but I usu­ally still glance through all the titles though. There is the minis­cule chance there might be some real mail in there, but mostly I enjoy the ways the try and slip through the net. This morn­ing there were at least 6 dou­ble emails. The sender, sub­ject and time received were iden­ti­cal, I even went to the Pos­tini site and com­pared the con­tents, they were iden­ti­cal too. Did they fig­ure they could fool the fil­ters by send­ing more than one?

Any­way, my favorite spam email for today was from venebw@telia.com with the sub­ject of Tiberius Erec­tus — Rock her all night long.

Heee’s baaack! I got one of these via gmail last Octo­ber and this one came to the mr-miata account. This time it is base­ball, not bas­ket­ball, but it is nearly word for word oth­er­wise. The snail mail addy & phone are the same. Both the phone num­ber and ip address are from Nor­man, OK. I think, but can’t be sure, the email address is dif­fer­ent. Still not sure what this is really about, but if you want in on this email me and I’ll for­ward you the email…

Hello,

I was brows­ing through the results from a search engine when I came across your site. It has a lot of good, rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and I was hop­ing that we could exchange links. Doing so would not only help our reg­u­lar vis­i­tors find other use­ful pages, but it would also make our sites rank higher in search engines like Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. Exchang­ing links would be free and ben­e­fi­cial for both of our sites.

The site has links at the top of every MLB team page which would give you access to local traf­fic and out of town vis­i­tor going to and from the games.

My web page is over 4 years old and receives more than 2,000 vis­i­tors a day. I try to offer the best infor­ma­tion avail­able on any topic I think my vis­i­tors would appreciate.

If you’d like to exchange links for our mutual ben­e­fit, I’d be happy to dis­cuss it with you over email.

Sin­cerely,
Jeremy
MLB­Play­ers
2215 West Lind­sey
Suite 102
Nor­man, Ok 73071
4053212922 (please no phone calls)

Spam Count: 64 for Fri­day, 62 on Sat­ur­day and 74 on Sunday.

Among the smut and meds, this week’s newest trend, uncounted riches are promised. I didn’t open them to see if they were a vari­a­tion on the Niger­ian scheme, but I’m bet­ting they’re not, they are prob­a­bly the usual crap with a “catchy” title.

rrlioynmfpqmqr@mypersonalemail.com sez: Mr. Payne has $989,165 for you and your fa…

yasijvmerlc@darkhorsefan.net sez: Mr. Mor­ton has $063,327 for you and your f…

xtvkaknfj@a4.no sez: Mr. Gates has $490,781 for you and your fa…

htmwq@pearl-online.de sez: Mr. Farmer has $099,258 for your family

vhslmjhnumx@smapxsmap.com sez: Mr. Cot­ton has $992,774 for you

kqgmfauugb@flashmail.com sez: Mr. Olsen has $699,071 for you

Over the week­end the Spam Index here at bbogardus@asco.com dipped back into the six­ties, with 66, 63 & 64 received. This morn­ing we were back up to 78.

I won­der if I can get a restrain­ing order against [no sender] because he keeps pes­ter­ing me about [no sub­ject].

arcosar@superonline.com was right, I just couldn’t ignore an email with the sub­ject line that read, Just can’t ignore this email. I didn’t open it, but I couldn’t help writ­ing about it here.

Thanks to CrawfordKWwqs@msn.com I now know where to get help if I’m ever bit by a radioac­tive arch­nid, the Spi­der­man Phar­macy.

We had Fri­day off from work so I have 4 days of spam to digest this morn­ing. And it seems if I was pre­ma­ture in sug­gest­ing that the lev­els were drop­ping back to the usual 50–60 a day, I think the new usual is going to be quite a bit higher. Reports from Fri­day through Mon­day indi­cate that my work email received 94,114, 85 & 94 pieces of unso­licited junk. Here are some low lights:

Heyz„ me again from Dickerson@glay.org Funny, I must have missed his first email amongst all the spam I’ve been get­ting recently.

Olsen Twins use online Phar­macy from LakishaLondonAnas@vSt.com I won­der how much endorse­ment money this meant to Mary Kate & Ashley?

Please Respond by Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:47:1… from gemmabehm@freemail.nl This seems to be a pop­u­lar new ploy. I got a bunch of these from var­i­ous senders with a time to respond about 12 hours after receipt of the mes­sage. I had bet­ter get right on them, if it is not too late.

[no sender] seems awfully insis­tent that he get in touch with me about [no sub­ject] because of the 94 emails I received between 6:00 AM Sun­day and 6:00 AM Mon­day, 11 of them were from him.

Since Tues­day morning’s peak of 102 pieces of spam the total has been slowly ebbing. Wednesday’s total was 99, Thurs­day was 83 and this morn­ing only 72. I’ll let you how the week­end goes on Mon­day, but for now here are a cou­ple of my favorites:

Samu­rai st0ck InfO from that noted Japan­ese war­rior, ngdgqasapwibfj@singmail.com

bequeath She sleeps around from Shake­speare using the nom de plume, Aelgcz@soha.com

The hit man I hired, bjfdesliwqbq@francimel.com dis­cretely emails me, hey bro-its done

This week’s most antic­i­pated email is [no sub­ject] from [no sender]. Finally. I have been wait­ing on pins and nee­dles to hear from [him] on [that].

Back on Decem­ber 16th I posted about how the email spam­mers had scored a new record by hit­ting my work email with 75 mes­sages, well that record has fallen. Not once, but twice in the last two days. Sat­ur­day the Pos­tini pro­gram blocked 85 slices of spam. Sun­day it stopped 92 and was cir­cum­vented by 2 more.

The spam­mers must be busy this time of year, because last Friday’s total came close to that ear­lier record too, but was just one shy at 74.

Our com­pany sub­scribes to a spam block­ing ser­vice. Every morn­ing the first mes­sage in the inbox is from the ser­vice list­ing all the spam so I can check to see if any “Real” email got stopped before get­ting in my inbox. Today was a new record for me in terms of quan­tity, usu­ally I get around 50–60 bits of spam, but today I had 75 caught in the netting:

This morn­ing in my inbox I received this lit­tle ditty:

I actu­ally did rant once about Ron Jeremy and Extenze so it is con­ceiv­able that I might show up on Google when search­ing for that com­bi­na­tion of words. There wasn’t any click­able link to Beth’s site, so I typed in www.bethperry.com and got a “Page Can­not Be Dis­played” error. Hmmm. Type in the URL in Google and get 3 options, 1) web pages sim­i­lar to - noth­ing, 2) web pages linked to — noth­ing and web­pages that con­tain the term — one hit, a fel­low blog­ger with the same expe­ri­ence, just dif­fer­ent search terms.

Curi­ous, I type in extenze ron jeremy in the Google search win­dow and there is my site, not at 14, but on the 3rd page about #27. Because I have been in a play­ful spam mood this week, I decided to write back to Beth:

I haven’t got­ten the email bounced back by now, so I’m bet­ting that some­one or thing got it. After I had a good laugh with my co-workers by read­ing Beth’s let­ter and my response, I got to think­ing just what might this be about. It isn’t like com­ment spam where the intent is to spread the google rank­ing seeds of crabby inter­net scum sites hither and yon. The only thing I can fig­ure is my lit­tle bit of fun played right into her hands. By reply­ing I con­firmed that they had a valid email address that they could then resell.

Any­body else heard from Beth Perry lately?
Con­tinue read­ing Heard From Beth Perry Lately?