Have you been getting a lot of extra spam recently? Spam that seems to be slipping by the filters? I am. There’s a couple kinds of spam that seems to getting through our usually very reliable server based spam checker called MailScanner. One, I kind of understand. The message is contained in a small image attachment. It’s very difficult for filters to detect content in images as this article explains. What I don’t understand is the pure text spam always with the subject line “It me (fill in the name)”. The body of the message is always touting some penny stock. It’s almost become funny. In our house we shout at each other “It me, Blaine!”, “It me, Quentin!”, “It me Domonique!”. Almost funny…
It’s the relative scale of spam that makes it so maddening. If one guy, over the course of the next week, decides that he really does need viagra, it makes 50 million spams “worth it.” Virtually all of the true costs are passed on to us. We’re the ones who have to sort and delete.
I oppose the death penalty, but for spammers, I’d reconsider.
Thanks for your efforts Bob. As always, Morse Media is the best hosting around.
Filtering can be a double-edged sword. I can tweak the level of filtering that would probably catch most of the things that are getting through, but then, like Google’s filter, there would be more false positives.
I am in touch with the MailScanner folks to see what they can do to improve the software from their end.
I get tons of the “it me Monique” letters. I also get ones titled “Nellie” from “Nellie Stern” or “Bob” from “Bob Thompson,” etc. I think there’s been a few other variations, too.
We end up double-filtering most of our mail through you guys and then through Gmail. Gmail is greedy — it gets all the “it me Monique” ones, but it ends up filtering a lot of legitimate mail, too, which kid of makes it worthless.
Strange that spam is coming back at the same time that telemarketers are coming back.
Glad it’s not just me. My service has generally had a great spam filter, but lately lots have gotten through.