Sunday, November 02, 2003

Trends in spam

The main themes of the spam I've been getting recently are as follows:

-Penis enlargement
-Viagra (and alternatives)
-Pain medication
-Debt relief (especially a variant that the header calls "Debt relief from a Christian perspective)
-Pr0n - usually underage

I don't actually have to read any of these, thankfully. I run SpamAssassin on my mailserver, which puts anything that scores higher than 4.5 on the Spam-o-meter into a "junkmail" IMAP folder. Anything that passes muster goes into my regular inbox, which I download using Entourage (for POP3, not IMAP access). To flush the junk, every few days I use IMP (a webmail client) running on the server to browse the spam titles and see if anything got flagged by mistake. I was getting over 100 spams per day - but I had my old Holyoke account nuked entirely this past week (they were forwarding it for me) and that cut out a lot of the load. Now I'm down to around 25 or so per day. I get about one false-positive per week, and a spam makes it through the filter every couple of days.

No takers yet on my old PowerBook - I can make you such a deal!

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