The spammers are getting to me!
Thursday, October 26, 2006 at 7:00AM You know all those emails you get from real people where it's obvious some spammer has hijacked the email address of the person and has sent you some crap and the subject line has some two-word phrase (typically a modifier-adjective combo)?
Well, those things drive me nuts.
Why?
I actually get a lot of legit emails from people with subject lines like "disturbing flippant," "outrageously self-absorbed," and "brilliantly insightful." So I have to check through all this stuff, always looking for the "Tom/Dr. Barnett" at the top of the email that says it's a real email (whether I care for the message is--of course--a different thing!).
I dunno, maybe this approach drives other people nuts too, or maybe I just get a lot of over-the-top email so I'm particularly vulnerable to this latest trend.
Reader Comments (3)
I don't know what you use to read, but if you get a Bayesian filter, it looks for spam by reading the content, not just looking for the subject line. I use SpamAssassin on a unix box, and it's made that email address usable, and there are plugins for that kind of filtering for Outlook and other packages.
Dave - Tom has written that he uses a Mac. If he hasn't gone off and installed some other mail client, the Mail.app program he's using already has a bayesian filter that I find quite good. As PenGun has noted, the spammers are trying to train the filters to let more of their stuff through. There are cures for it but you can lose some legitimate mail that way.
That sucks. That's time lost on other important stuff(like football, or the Wife and Kidlets). Bastiches.
Well, now I don't feel to bad that when I send anything it has a long subject.