frgdr.com

In the last few days I was fortunate enough to feast my eyes on the work of three kinds of spammers:

Spammer Type #1: The Updated Type

This guy truly believes every crisis is an opportunity and the current global pandemic can be harnessed to sell swine flu drugs:

Spammer Type #2: The Slacker Type

This guy has become so nonchalant about his daily sending of millions of unsolicited emails, he doesn’t even bother to proofread anymore, thus greeting millions of recipients with “Hello, {#TO_NAME}“:

Spammer Type #3: The Creative Type

This guy decided to flavor his spam with a long forgotten incident from The Simpsons, where Lisa, not Bart, is writing on the blackboard:

This is the relevant frame from that Simpsons episode:

• Make sure you read my short post titled ‘Help Yourself Reduce the Amount of Spam You Get – In 5 Easy Steps‘.
• If you host a WordPress blog, give Akismet a rest and check out a much better solution: WP-SpamFree which fights comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam.

Take a letter, Miss Jones,
Due to the world situation
The shrinking pound, the global slump
And the price of oil
I’m afraid we must fire you
We no longer require you
It’s just another sign of the times, Miss Jones,
A most miserable sign of the times
 
   – - from the musical “Blood Brothers” written in 1981 by Willy Russell

I just received this spam message in one of my email honeypots. I sure hate spam, but I thought I would post this. The content of this email may or may not be real. Not sure if carpenters from Illinois spell the name of their state without a capital I, and misspell ‘ads’ three times. Oh well…

Subject: If you could help someone for free by just clicking your mouse would you?

I have a wife and 2 sons. I am a carpenter in illinois. I am layed off work. A pretty normal thing for anyone in the trades right now. We are a real family.

I am giving you these links to my parked domains(web site names). I let google fill the page with adds. All I need is people to click on the adds. Nothing to buy.

No risk of fraud or anything bad. Just click on the adds and google pays me .05 per click. Please forward this email to everyone you know.

38-year-old Eddie is convinced his digital life would be better upon meeting five types of people and showing them the unexpected negative impact they have on others:

The Under-Tagger – This guy would spend a week going through old video cassettes, finding the amazing CNN footage from 1983 he was looking for, but upon uploading it to YouTube would title it: ‘She Lied!’ and would tag it using three keywords or less, at least one of which is misspelled. The Under-Tagger assumes that since you can clearly recognize the people in the video, there is no need to be petty and elaborate on it in the title, description or keywords, and as a result of that no one can find his video even when searching for relevant keywords.

The Non-Linker – This guy would spend an hour blogging on a recent survey or commenting on an obscure news item, spewing lots of words and ideas without supplying a single link to the actual survey or the original news item. If this guy writes in a different language, say Hebrew, he would never consider supplying the English spelling of names of people or companies he writes about. The Non-Linker believes he is the alpha and the omega and thus his readers need not check out additional data on other websites.

The Voluntary Spammer – A relic of Web 1.0, this guy truly believes everything he reads in emails he receives, and feels it is his moral duty to forward them to all his friends. From a new computer virus and PowerPoint slideshows, to ladies dying from perfume spraying and cash giveaways from Microsoft, this guy assumes the newspapers do not report the big stuff, and that everyone in his contact list is interested in the small stuff. The Voluntary Spammer tends to get offended when you try to explain this to him over the phone, claiming he only wanted to help.

The Armchair Activist – This guy had joined dozens of groups on Facebook from curing AIDS to freeing Tibet, and truly believes he has done his part. Without once leaving his house or donating a buck to causes he really believes in, the Armchair Activist feels so good about himself he often tries to recruit his friends in the hope that AIDS would really be cured if only one million people click a button.

The BCC-Denier – This guy sends an invitation to his new exhibit by email, adding hundreds of people to the TO section, assuming that since all of them know him, they should all know one another. A direct result of this gross faux pas comes from recipients who RSVP by clicking Reply-All, and people who harvest email addresses revealed in the email for their weekly newsletter.

The year has just begun, and if you could not think of a new year resolution to make, how about helping yourself by taking some actions towards reducing the amount of unwanted emails you receive?

Here are 5 things you absolutely can start doing today:
1. Do not post your email address anywhere, not even using address munging.
2. Use BugMeNot as a way to bypass compulsory registration on websites
3. Use a disposable email address for website you could not bypass.
4. Teach your friends some manners and ask them to use BCC when sending emails to multiple recipients.
5. Install MailWasher and teach it to automatically filter your emails

Happy (Spam-free) New Year!