dougandrews.co.uk

November 17, 2009

Spam keywords

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 9:59 am

My spam folder had 360 emails in this morning. Instead of going through the lot I decided to try and whittle them down by searching on keywords. These seemed to fall into the following main categories, there is some overlap between them:

Sex:

viagra

satisfy/satisfaction

penis/pen1s

Gambling:

royale

casino

Spoofs:

received

reminder

amazon

skype

verizon

address (my address has changed)

mailbox

Gifts:

wathes (watches!)

watches

warranty

received

real

Medicine:

Codeine

Symbols:

$%!?

Desperate/vunerable:

diploma

degree

Misc:

we

something

Using the above I managed to delete about 300 of my initial 360. There were 21 false positives, mostly message failed or undeliverable notices ro auto-emails that were genuine, and about 40 which didn’t fall into any of the above and were not sufficiently volumous to make it worth trying to search on each one.

When I started I thought it would be easier than trawling through them but there were a lot more variables than I expected. It would probably make sense to do this if you’ve been away for a couple of weeks and come back to 3,000+ spam emails but on a daily basis I think I’ll just reach for the delete button.

October 19, 2009

‘Castellum group’ Spam/phishing email

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 3:56 pm

I had an interesting email today that caught me eye: despite being addressed directly to me and including pertinent information (i.e. correct geographic location) I am convinced that it is spam – although having looked online to see if anyone else has received anything similar I’ve found nothing. The reason for bothering to post this online is because the personalised nature of it made it stand out as an advance in their techniques.

I’m including a copy of the email below, but the reasons for thinking it is Spam are:

- a hotmail sender address! (debbish6els@hotmail.com)

- The ‘Castellum Group’ is spelt Castellum and Castelum and put in inverted commas in an effort (I guess) of making it seem more important

- spelling mistakes (word wide web)

- grammar (we are looking for the new, talented, and responsible staff)

- classic Spam territory: financial transfers

- dubious promises (You will not have to pay the any tax)

- a different reply-to address than the sender address

- a search for the Castellum Group brings up a real estate company, not a financial services company

Here’s the email:

Dear Doug Andrews,
“The Castellum Group” is glad to announce an opening for the position of a customer relations manager in Market harborough.
Our company specializes in providing all types of protection for the business and transactions done through the word wide web. “The Castelum Group” is continuously growing and improving its globally offered services, and we are looking for the new, talented, and responsible staff. This is your chance to join a huge team of specialists and to get an interesting and rewarding job.
Our research department has considered all available methods of the financial assets transfer from our clients to us, as well as the need for the direct interaction with the clients, and concluded that the most effective approach would be finding a representative in each particular country. This would allow us to considerably reduce the cost and significantly increase the convenience of the services provided to our customers.
You will not have to pay the any tax or postal expenses. All these costs will be covered by “The Castellum Group”.
There are several suggestions and requirements for a successful candidate. The main one is the responsibility and reliability of such individual. We also welcome great people skills, and the ability to foster relationships with the clients – a charismatic person will have an advantage in the interview process. An ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues on the spot would be very useful.
An absolute must is having at least a twice a day access to the internet for communication with our managers and the use of the online office.

If you are interested in this job opening, please send your resume in the DOC or rich text format to our email castellumgr@gmail.com .

April 4, 2008

Diminishing returns of a Spam email

Filed under: Spam,comment — admin @ 8:20 am

diminishing returns of a spam email

The above is a snapshot of the traffic to my site resulting from my post on a phishing email – the lows are the weekends, the highs Monday morning when they have obviously posted a fresh batch of their emails.

It’s interesting to note the diminishing returns – presumably given that Spam emails by their nature are not targeted specifically but just sent out to as many people as possible the market starts to get saturated quite quickly with people having already received the email in previous weeks and they’ve either acted upon it or taken the decision to bin it.

This process may have been hastened by the decision of one of the visitors to my site to send a link to my post to the senders of the email. I’m guessing they’ll give up on the template they have been using and will simply start off afresh with something different soon.

April 3, 2008

Google Adwords phishing emails

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 8:00 am

In the last week I’ve started to get a number of emails from Google Adwords asking me to reactivate my account or variations on a theme. They’re phishing emails but very well done, it took a bit of investigation. Here’s the last one I got:

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does,
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

———————————————————————————-

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information.

We will reactivate you account after you update your billing information.

In order to reactivate your account, please sign it to your account at
http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing information.
Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed,
any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

Advertise your business on Google
No matter what your budget, you can display your ads on Google and our advertising network. Pay only if people click your ads.

———————————————————————————-
The Google AdWords Team

 

I did notify Google and got an auto-generated email saying that they weren’t responsible (true enough) and never to click on a link in an email but go directly to the site if in doubt.

Things to look for:

- they’re being sent to any number of domain registered email addresses i.e. email@selfcateringhols.com, email123@selfcateringhols.com etc, so check if the recipient is the email address to which the account is registered.

- if you open the email, go to file > properties and then click on the details tab you’ll see the email source code, check out the return path:

Return-Path: <floridaregionflag@yahoo.com>

March 10, 2008

Monday morning Spam count

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 10:31 am

Inbox: 594 new messages, of which 498 were Spam

Spam folder: first thing it was at 2579; by the time I worked through my Inbox it was at 2654; by the time I’d got to the bottom of the list it was at 2667. There were 2 false positives, about average.

It used to send my eyes funny scrolling through the Spam folder so have a technique I use now which makes it less onerous:

- start at the top of the list (if ordered so that most recent messages come in at the bottom)

- have the ‘preview’ option turned off, so you just see the titles

- use the arrow keys to work down the first page; when at the bottom, press ‘page down’ and then ‘page up’.

- repeat the process till you get to the bottom of the list

- empty the Spam folder

In this way your eyes do not have to cope with scrolling, you can take your time as any new messages come in a the bottom so they will be checked last anyway.

March 7, 2008

Spammy results in google

Filed under: Spam,comment — admin @ 12:26 pm

The search results in Google now are typically VERY good, which is why I was so surprised to see a bad Spammy site at number 1 in the search results. Going back a few years there was a period of time when the results were plagued with this kind of stuff but I haven’t seen anything so bad ranking so well for a long time.

See the search results page

The number one result leads to a site which has a load of other links. Of the links I clicked a high proportion were ‘under construction’, error 404 pages or went to a site laden with sponsored links disguised to look like real (i.e. contextual) links. Surely there’s a better result to display than this?

March 1, 2008

I wish email would hurry up and die

Filed under: Spam,comment — admin @ 10:52 am

Today I received an email from an owner, here’s an extract:

“we have used several web holiday agency sites over the years and this year we have tried out some new ones, some with enormous success. of the new ones we tried to get going two have been marked by a complete failire. yours is one of those sites.”

This is terrible news, what could have caused such a complete failure?

The reason was that the owner was experiencing technical problems and “despite emailing you about this problem we have had no assitance to resolve the problem.”

It has become cliché to hear ‘your call is important to us’ and similar whilst on the end of a never ending telephone queue, but without wanting to sound cliché: all enquiries are important to us, which is why we have invested a lot to ensure that ALL emails, messages and calls received are answered in a timely fashion.

So why did this owner not receive a response? Because we can only answer emails that we receive, but email being email there is no guarantee that it will ever be read by the recipient – In this case we simply did not get the owners’ email.

Because of the levels of Spam received we now auto delete any email sent to a non-existent selfcateringhols email address, so any typo and we will not get it.

Of the emails sent to legitimate email addresses, we get approximately 1,000 Spam emails a day. We go through all of these on a daily basis, but it is not exact and there is always the potential for a legitimate email to get deleted along with the Spam.

Email used to be great, but it now has severe limitations and the main problem is that people do not always understand these. We have been using now our own site based messaging system for a number of years which gets around this problem: contact us via the site and we are guaranteed to receive it, which means you are sure to get a response.

There has always been a certain resistance to using it for one reason or another, but a recent report by hitwise showed that there is a trend now to send email via social networking sites rather than normal email.

This I think is positive as it will help people get used to the concept of internal site messages. Email has had it’s day, the levels of Spam means people (or the companies that manage your email) have thrown up all sorts of obstacles to receiving emails, thus making it relatively unusable.

To make communication workable the obstacles need to be removed, so guaranteeing receipt, whilst avoiding the ensuing avalanche of Spam. Site based communication does this, the sooner that people get used to it the better.

We will continue to make every effort to ensure all emails are dealt with as effectively as possible but to be sure of getting a response PLEASE send us a message via the site.

February 25, 2008

Monday morning Spam count

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 10:24 am

2620 emails to download.

2214 in my Spam folder

406 in my Inbox

After going through my Inbox, of the 406 new emails, 78 remained, so 328 Spam emails got through my filter.

Within the Spam folder there were 2 false positives, right at the end of the list. I thought for a minute it would be 100% Spam but no such luck, looks like going through my Spam list is something I’m going to have to continue.

For the record, I use Norton 360.

February 18, 2008

Asia domain name Spam

Filed under: Spam,comment — admin @ 12:06 pm

I’m expecting another round of Spam emails regarding your domain name being registered in Asia will be sent out around now – since my posting there has been a very regular pattern of people looking to see if there’s any information online about this: typically there is a Monday morning spike, with interest tailing off through the week. By the weekend interest is virtually nil. The pattern then repeats itself. It is not unlike the stats for selfcateringhols, (although visitors for selfcateringhols doesn’t fall quite so dramatically at the weekend), it just demonstrates what a business this is. Sadly their Spam must generate enough weekly interest for them to keep sending out another batch the following week.

February 11, 2008

4,500 Spam emails, + Spam from Wayne?

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 10:30 am

It’s that time again, Monday morning, when I have to wade my way through the weekend’s Spam. Pretty bad this week, with 3,000+ emails in my Spam box and a further 1,500 in my inbox (my Spam filter apparently decided enough was enough and took a break).

There were 4 false positives in my Spam box, so the filter identified 0.13% as Spam which it shouldn’t have.

I had an email from WAYNE (where are you now?) which I registered with when it first came out a while back to see what it was like. The email said I had a message from ‘Anna’. I checked out the URL to make sure it wasn’t a spoof and then tried it out. Apparently the link was no longer valid, but it did go to www.wayne.com. Are they sending out bogus ‘you’ve got a message’ emails to generate more visitors???

Here is the email:

Anna has sent you a message.

To read the message from Anna, click on the following link below:

http://www.wayn.com/waynfx.html?wci=link&id=2008&message_key=1740&lam=6083844&las=D05EF7A7C8D3549CEADAC02F6FBA4D1D

Thanks,

WAYN

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