From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Clueless spammer
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 20:52:39 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:41 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Clueless spammer

> Despite my whitelisting, I continue to get more spam than legitimate
> email.  So far, it's still a manageable amount.
>
> Today I got a spam that said our site had been listed on an index of
> sites about Norway.  It asked us for a reciprocal link.
>
> The page of ours which they mentioned -- one of the online WSFA
> Journals -- did indeed mention Norway.  The mention was in a list
> of dozens of countries that our website has gotten hits from; part
> of a report on our website that I wrote for the Journal.  Obviously
> no human being at the spammer's site actually read it.  It's all
> automated.  Mindless robots spewing gigabytes of mindless spew.
>
> Each spam has about the same odds of being seen and acted on as an ad
> tied to a brick and dropped in the middle of the ocean in hopes of
> being seen by someone in a passing bathyscaphe.  But with enough
> *trillions* of them, the numbers quickly add up.
>
> I quickly blocked future spams on the same template, before I get
> similar ones for each of the countries, states, towns, people,
> products, foods, concepts, etc., that are mentioned anywhere on
> our website.
>
> It occurs to me that by now it's almost certainly true that the
> majority of text ever written has consisted of spams.  As such, it's
> curious how little formal academic study has been made of the topic.
> Ph.D. candidates, take note.

It seems like the majority of spam I get these days will have four random
words (weird juxtapositions) in the subject line.  (The rest say Hi! or
Check It Out or something similar.)  What I find stranger are the names of
the putative senders.  Very often they are first and last names (some of
them distinctive) of people from whom I receive email, but rearranged into
new names.   At first I thought this was coincidence.  Now I am less sure.

--Ted White