|
Week 3 - September 15 to November 10, 2002
Number of spam messages for this report: 7,310 (43.95 MB) Quite a long week, wasn't it ? I am honestly considering renaming this to The Monthly Spam Report. A weekly page is quite a commitment, specially when you want to try to have a life on weekends. Let's see how it goes from here... In the last week (real, calendar week) I noticed a sensible drop in the number of spams I receive a day. I considered the possibility that this was a global phenomenon but, alas, no such luck. What happened was that one of my old e-mail addresses, which was still forwarding to my current mailbox, stopped working. I did not complain; I can live with receiving less spam. Still, there are way too many messages in my spam folder today. So many, in fact, that it is simply not practical to look at them manually in any detail. So, I cooked up a small Perl script to do some statistics on the messages. It is still very simple and does not give much data, but I hope to improve it with time. Here's what it tells me so far: Most common "From:" headers:
Most common "Subject:" headers:
These numbers are a little misleading, because they don't take into account minute changes in the From: or Subject: headers made by the spammers to avoid automatic detection. This is one thing that I need to improve in this script. But, other than numbers, there is one thing I'd like to talk about here... I've seen people mentioning that a good way to fight spammers is by boycotting businesses that spam. I agree with that, and I will not knowingly do business with someone who spams me, unless I have no other choice. However, I noticed a very scary thing: depending on how far you go, boycotting spammers can put you right out of society. I'll explain: for many messages, it's hard to see whom, exactly, you should boycott. Should you boycott just the one spammer who sent the message ? If so, how do you know who is he ? And, more importantly, would you be doing business with him in the first place ? Or should you boycott whomever would profit if you responded to the spam ? That might be way too broad. Let's see a few examples: one message said "Win a 2002 Corvette!"; the contest seems to be run by surveynetworks.com. I don't think I should boycott Corvettes and, in fact, I'd very much appreciate getting a brand new one. surveynetworks.com, on the other hand, doesn't rank too well with me. Maybe that one was a little too far-fetched; let's see another one, one I am sure most of you are familiar with. Let's take any of the spams advertising Viagra. Now, assuming that they are really delivering something to buyers, and that what they deliver is, actually, Viagra (a long shot, I know), then presumably Pfizer would make money if I bought something from the spammer. Should I boycott them ? I don't think so. Not that I need them, of course. What am I trying to say ? Well, I'm not really sure. I guess my point is that moderation in all things is a virtue. Even when LARTing spammers. More people not to vote for this week: I have a lot of them, but now the elections are over. Maybe in two years I'll post the full list, so people won't forget. Worst spam in this "long week": the one saying "Urgent message regarding your application". I actually had a pending application to something, and I was expecting an e-mail about it. So each one of those 24 spams actually made me hope the response was here, and then I saw an add for an Unsecured Centennial Credit Card. Please, please, if you have a Centennial card, cancel it, then break the card in small parts and mail it to me. You'll win a friend for life. That's it for today, folks. In an update about that "1 Euro bill" thing, I did get several more copies of that particular spam. No one ever called me, though.
|
[Last modified: 10-NOV-2002]
The Weekly Spam Report
Last updated November 10th, 2002. Send feedback, comments and criticism to
Wilson Afonso.
