Aquarionics

Clever Spam.

I get quite a bit of spam. Spamassassin catches about 40 pieces per day. I look at most of it, mostly to see what types I'm getting most today. Yesterdays totals were:

• Misc: 21
  • Leads, 100 Time Dated..FREE! (Cheap pencil refils with best-before dates)
  • Colon Cleanse (Cheap, Clean punctuation)
• Viri: 4
• Search Engines: 2
• 419: 1
• Unrenderable Subject Lines: 14
• False Positives: 1
• Porn: 4
  • TIGHT VIRGIN TEENS ON CAM (Young employees of Richard Branson go punting)
  • free amateur xxx (Cheap remake of Vin Diesel movie)
  • Safe sex with a bored housewife (Be still my beating heart)

But my favourite one is this one:

You're probably thinking to yourself, "Oh geez, not another
miracle diet pill!"  Like you, I was +skeptical at first, but
my sister swore it helped her lose 23 pounds in just four weeks,
so I told her I'd give it a shot.  I mean, there was nothing

Because the code - which Mutt displayed, not being a HTML Mail reader - was like this:

You're proba<!--PPSOjQ-->bly thinking to yourself, "Oh geez, not another<BR>
mira<!--PPSOjQ-->cle die<!--PPSOjQ-->t pill!"  Like you, I was
+ske<!--PPSOjQ-->ptical at first, but <BR>
my sister swore it helped her lose 23 pounds in just four weeks, <BR>
so I told her I'd give it a shot.  I mean, there was nothing <BR>

Meaning that Spamassassin failed to catch it because it contained the words "miracle diet pill", and was resorted to... lets see...

SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ----------------------
SPAM: This mail is probably spam.  The original message has been altered
SPAM: so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future.
SPAM: See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details.
SPAM:
SPAM: Content analysis details:   (15.9 hits, 5 required)
SPAM: Hit! (2.4 points)  'Message-Id' was added by a relay (2)
SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point)   From: ends in numbers
SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point)   Subject: contains a question mark
SPAM: Hit! (2.8 points)  BODY: Offers a full refund
SPAM: Hit! (1.9 points)  BODY: Contains word 'guarantee' in all-caps
SPAM: Hit! (1.5 points)  BODY: Asks you to click below
SPAM: Hit! (2.1 points)  BODY: FONT Size +2 and up or 3 and up
SPAM: Hit! (3.2 points)  HTML-only mail, with no text version
SPAM:
SPAM: -------------------- End of SpamAssassin results ---------------------

Spamassassin good. I like Spamassassin :-)