Anjanesh

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New Wave of Spam

Monday, December 25, 2006
Spam is now skyrocketing never like before. Its been the latest talked about issue for some time now. We are all dealing with a great amount of spam these days and blocking email addresses or entire domain names are not going to help in the long run for the end user. Email services like Gmail, Y! and MSN have are spending tons on anti-spam algorithms. Recent trend is spam emails are sending in an image containing the spam text while the text within the email contains actual well-formed sentences, on mostly general-knowledge that has nothing to do with you. Email text no longer has words like 'viagra' or 'broker', but real meaningful sentences. Its the image with all the rainbow colours that contains all the junk (wordings) with the click-link to their site. Most of these spam mails have a purpose - for you to click the link and either extract some confidential information from you or just to know if your email address really exists and still active. Either way, once you click the link you they store the information on their server. Heres a recent email I got which Yahoo didn't mark as spam. Spam Email Screenshot There are some spam-mails that have no images, no links - just pure meaningful 1-2 lines of text that has nothing to do with you and yet spam - and yet it may sound like its someone you may have contacted before. Whats the point in sending out these kind of emails without being able the track us in some linked-way ? I don't know, but maybe there'll be higher replies for such emails thus verifying the your email ? The email I got definitely is useless since it mentions "virus-free version" ! Had it been "pdf version", it would've been more believable. Moreover, the sender is "sexy james" which itself means 'spam' thesedays. Don't accept mails from addresses having 'sexy', 'honey', 'hottie' etc. If your friends got addresses having sexy-cool names, encourage them to use proper email addresses. Two years ago, one my college classmates attended a job-interview and when the female HR asked for his email address, he replied (seriously) "honey4you83@..." ! At the end of a successful interview if you give your email address bitchinbabe@yahoo.com, what do you expect from the HR, Yahoo Bitchin' Babe, you got the job ! ?

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