Spam

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 4th, 2009 | 2 Comments

I have never had much trouble with spam before, sure i get loads of spam to my e-mail account but it never reaches my inbox. Over the past month i have noticed a rapid increase in the amount of spam that i have been getting to this blog. I have gotton over 500 spam comments in the last month alone!

Luckily i have the askimet wordpress plugin, without it i would of been overwhelmed with spam on my blog. I would have to delete each comment individually, and if you try to delete 500 comments it would take a fair bit of time.

The graph above is a view of the rise in spam in my blog post, as you can see it really started to take off around the March 2009 section of this year, this is a complete reflection on the fact that i started to blog a lot more from the beginning of March. It just goes to show if you work more on a site and that site begins to get traffic that you will not escape the spammers. Well good luck to them because they are not getting publicity on this site, as soon as there few hundred word comments with god knows how many links gets left, instantly Askimet will detect it and remove it before it appears on the site at all. Now thats what i call service!

Spamming A Spammer

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: March 11th, 2009 | 2 Comments

No matter where you sign up for an e-mail account you always seem to get spam sent to you. Even on websites including this one, you get spam. There are filter blocks installed by e-mail account providers to prevent this spam getting into your inbox instead it is simply forwarded to you spam folder.

Out of all the e-mail account providers i use i think that Gmail have to be the best at blocking out the spam. However every now and again a rare spam mail slips through the filters and usually i will just report it so it cant be caught in future.

Earlier today i received a spam e-mail that reached my inbox,  so instead of reporting this message i decided to run with it! I copied the entire e-mail they sent me and sent it back to them, it read something like this:

My name is RAJUEDRAN MARRAPAN, I am the branch manager of the International Commercial Bank Kumasi branch Ghana. I got your information during my search through the Internet. I am 46years of age and married with 2 lovely kids. It may interest you to hear that I am a Man of peace and I don't want problem, but I do not know how you will feel about this because you may have double mind. But I am telling you that this is real and you are not going to regret after doing this transaction with me.

I know this is just a standard e-mail that gets sent to everyone but i thought it would be a good idea to send him one so he does not feel left out :) how generous of me! I did not expect him to reply, however he did! The message he wrote back to me was extremely long, too long to post here, but then towards the end he asked me for a few contact details:

(1) Your full and precise name which the will be project transacted in, this name will be used through out the duration of the project. I do not ask for an alias but rather, the correct spellings of the name, which also includes your middle name. (2)Your address where you receive you mails in case you are to be posted documents.(3) Your precise confidential telephone and fax number (4) your date of birth.. Mail these 4 details to me to me ASAP so I can get to work.

So once again i decided to write back, but this time i decided to write a load of rubbish and see what reaction i get out of him, here is the e-mail i sent back to him:

Dear Rajuendran Marrapan,

This sounds great i cannot wait to get a move with this project, unfortunately i am now dead and therefore a dead person cannot help you because he cannot put his heart and sole into the job. It is no skin of my nose because there is none due to very bad sun burn i recently acquired while going on a long brisk naked walk through the desert in Mexico.

Since i am no longer with the land of the living i cannot provide you with my banking or personal details due to the fact my spirit has moved on towards the heavens above and my wallet with my details is on my coffin 6 feet under. Would there be any available position for a ghost in your working establishment perhaps i could scare the living shit out of people that are not willing to do business with your clearly well thought out business ethics.

The big G man (GOD HIMSELF) has agreed to give me his bank details, he is obviously very rich and could bring your business to a whole new level. He also seems to think this is a great proposal, and says he has contacts in the same business as yourself , he considers himself the dragons den equivalent up here in the the big white cloud.

I look forward to your reply,

The swiftly moving ghost from above,

yours truly,

S

As i have just sent back this e-mail i am waiting on a reply, and if i get one i will post it up here for everyone to see.