Thread: Spam email

  1. #1
    Arggggh DeepFyre's Avatar
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    Spam email

    I keep getting weird email messages with these odd sayings and idioms and metaphors and stuff. There is always a spam email (i.e. sign up for a credit card, or trying to get my personal information someway or another) and at the bottom there will be a message like this:



    OFFTOPIC:
    Never the twain shall meet No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness Ignorance is bliss A good lawyer must be a great liar. Better an open enemy, than a false friend Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice inside the ceiling laugh
    Civility costs nothing Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

    Necessity is the mother of invention When a fool is silent, he too is counted among the wise And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger? If you believe everything you read, you better not read One mans meat is another mans poison!
    You have to understand, somethings you will never understand The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life, but a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit The West Wind Always Brings Wet Weather, The East Wind Wet and Cold Together, the South Wind Surely Brings Us Rain, the North Wind Blows It Back Again Some pork-knockers does only clear track fuh monkey run race. Any port in a storm First Impressions are the Most Lasting All the world loves a lover Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.


    when i look at the To: column for the message it says [email protected] where as my real address is [email protected]

    I usually ignore these emails, but decided to open one up for some reason and saw that message at the bottom .. was wondering if anybody else has been getting mail like this and if it has any meaning
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  2. #2
    Banned SniperSAS's Avatar
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    it has no meaning

  3. #3
    Been here, done that.
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    Lately I've been keeping track of some of the sender names for the spam I get. What a wierd list of names!

    Vietcong D. Memorandum
    Disinters P. Puget
    Smoothness J. Literature
    Inkiness B. Mariachis
    Holocausts Q. Coin
    Naiver O. Coordinator
    Chiropractor L. Canvasser
    Turgenev R. Fagot
    Internment I. Supplementing
    Favor A. Centuries
    Sodomy U. Saunters

    And the names in the email address itself:

    rqyqsypw@---
    xjitfdixbr@---
    3D6Xda4dca@---
    VXCKEXCVY@---
    nykyxylnnhcjk@---
    momvy2pqvss@---
    bdghkxsxpxjz@---
    cuhhvxvozndytw@---
    oayxkcaf@---
    pjobyxkabsxx@---
    qytuoqb@---
    Definition: Politics -- Latin, from
    poly meaning many and
    tics meaning blood sucking parasites
    -- Tom Smothers

  4. #4
    the Great ElastoManiac's Avatar
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    Stupid people think that's something deep and meaningfull, but thats just plain crap!!!
    lu lu lu I've got some apples lu lu lu You've got some too lu lu lu Let's make some applesauce Take off our clothes and lu lu lu

  5. #5
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    It's useless to keep track of return addresses, because these spammers use their own SMTP servers (usually). For example, take the Linux mail program, Pine. It uses its own SMTP to send the mail, so the user of Pine can choose any return address they like without actually having to own it.

    The best thing is to get some sort of spam blocker, and when you broadcast your email address, do it something like this:

    something [at] somethingelse.com

    That will help prevent spamming bots from harvesting it off the web.

  6. #6
    Registered /usr
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    Quote Originally Posted by joeprogrammer
    something [at] somethingelse.com

    That will help prevent spamming bots from harvesting it off the web.
    I've never understood why people say that. What's to stop bots being told that " [at] " is the same as @? Sure, they'd have a ton of extra info to crawl through, especially given that there's so many normal addresses about, but the potential is still there.

  7. #7
    Banned SniperSAS's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SMurf
    I've never understood why people say that. What's to stop bots being told that " [at] " is the same as @? Sure, they'd have a ton of extra info to crawl through, especially given that there's so many normal addresses about, but the potential is still there.
    Then just type it normally and post a thread about the spam you get

  8. #8
    C++ Witch laserlight's Avatar
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    What's to stop bots being told that " [at] " is the same as @? Sure, they'd have a ton of extra info to crawl through, especially given that there's so many normal addresses about, but the potential is still there.
    Well, if you dont have much sympathy for the visually impaired, an image such as those used by CAPTCHA systems could be used.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bjarne Stroustrup (2000-10-14)
    I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.
    Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

  9. #9
    Arggggh DeepFyre's Avatar
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    spam really isnt a problem for me, all the spam gets conveniently redirected into the trash bin 99% of the time, and when i sign up for really trashy sites (like trying to sign up for those free ipod things) i usually use mytrashmail or spamgourmet since some sites dont accept mytrashmail

    i just kind of found it interesting that whoever is sending this stuff went through the trouble of putting those messages at the bottom

    and something else to note: in the particular email that the original message i posted was in, it was an advertisement for stocks for a certain company, and every time the word stock was used, it was spelled incorrectly as stcok (this happened like 8 times)
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  10. #10
    Banned SniperSAS's Avatar
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    i am pretty sure no one is typing them, they are being generated by a cold unfeeling machine

  11. #11
    carry on JaWiB's Avatar
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    I always assumed the messages and mispellings were intentional to avoid spam filters...
    "Think not but that I know these things; or think
    I know them not: not therefore am I short
    Of knowing what I ought."
    -John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671)

    "Work hard and it might happen."
    -XSquared

  12. #12
    Moderately Rabid Decrypt's Avatar
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    Someone said in a different thread that extra text like that is used so that the pictures to text ratio is better, as that's one of the things spam filters check.
    Lately I've been keeping track of some of the sender names
    Last week I got spam from Jesus. Subject: Yo. Spam from heaven, what's next?
    There is a difference between tedious and difficult.

  13. #13
    Been here, done that.
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    Quote Originally Posted by joeprogrammer
    It's useless to keep track of return addresses...
    No it's not. They are quite funny and many give a good giggle.

    Quote Originally Posted by SMurf
    I've never understood why people say that. What's to stop bots being told that " [at] " is the same as @? Sure, they'd have a ton of extra info to crawl through, especially given that there's so many normal addresses about, but the potential is still there.
    That's what I always figured. IMAO you should encode the email address, like with the email encoder found here.
    Definition: Politics -- Latin, from
    poly meaning many and
    tics meaning blood sucking parasites
    -- Tom Smothers

  14. #14
    & the hat of GPL slaying Thantos's Avatar
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    WaltP if the browser can easily change it from entity codes to an email address what is to stop a bot from doing the same?

  15. #15
    verbose cat
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    Quote Originally Posted by SniperSAS
    i am pretty sure no one is typing them, they are being generated by a cold unfeeling machine
    Actually, it is the collective conciousness of the internet having come to life and trying to reach out to humanity. And since spam is what most of the internet traffic consists of, this newly aware Internet naively assumes that most of humanity is actually reading this trash and thus has the best chance of contact through these messages.

    And the reason it doesn't just come right out and say "Hi, I am the internet, lets have a party" or something is because since spam is the most prolific form of communication across the net, this naive internet thinks that we all speak in haiku and gibberish. Kind of like a non-German speaking american being dropped in Germany and trying to speak German to a German citizen...

    The fact that the machines housing this collective and naive conciousness are cold and unfeeling is coincidental.
    abachler: "A great programmer never stops optimizing a piece of code until it consists of nothing but preprocessor directives and comments "

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