* Timothy Knox <[email protected]> [2007-04-30 06:55]: > I can tell it is spam because all list traffic I receive, and I > only get geek stuff at home via mailing lists, is color-coded. > Anything that looks geek-like, but isn't from one of my lists, > is thus easily recognisable.
Similar here: the mailing list traffic is filtered on receipt, so as soon as I see a long rambly geekish subject in my inbox I am automatically 80% confident it is spam. I am usually greeted by an unwrapped wall of text when I peek inside, which instantly sentences the mail to the bitbucket without me reading a word of it, since that's a sure sign of autogenerated drivel. It seems they pick text from pages close to where they found your email address, btw. I've had several such spam mails containing stuff I WROTE MYSELF. I did a doubletake or two before I caught on to the pattern -- eerie! Thankfully I don't get much of this sort of spam so it's more of a curiosity than a real irritation. I really hope the tide doesn't rise significantly, though. I've seen a similar strategy employed by comment spammers on weblogs lately: they pick old posts, pluck a sentence or two from an existing comment, and use a plausible name but spammy URI to sign the spam comment. If you've long forgotten the conversation >from the comments, it looks completely legitimate at first blush and makes it easy to get fooled unless you pay sharp attention. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
