Is Spam Really Working… It must be right?
August 3, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
Taking care of one of my regular Monday morning routines. Doing a quick scan of my email Junk Mail folders and trying to figure out if there’s anything in there important. A very rarely get false positives in my spam filters, but every now and then it does happen so I’ve got to scan quickly.
As I’m scanning I usually do a couple of things to make legitimate messages pop-out a little bit from the rest of the junk in the folders. I’ll sort by name first and quickly delete patterns of emails, then switch to sorting by subject and do the same thing. I’ve found by doing this I can usually eliminate more than 50% of my junk mail quickly. Today I started with 286 messages and after these two steps I had it down to about 120 messages left.
Looking at subject lines closer I began to ask myself exactly who’s actually looking and clicking on this stuff? That’s how it works right? If people weren’t clicking on the messages and the links included in them, spammers wouldn’t be doing it right?
Spelling mistakes, lewd subject lines, false hopes, Nigerian money schemes, and now the ever popular Acai berry. Who’s clicking on this stuff? If you’re reading this and you are, STOP IT!
It baffles me. Anti-spam software is getting so good now that like you I very rarely see a false positive and maybe get one spam email every couple of days that creeps through the filters (this equate to the filters missing ~2% of spam).
But, as you state, who is falling for the phishing? Who is clicking the links? Who is even opening some of this junk?
The sender and subject line are akin to the envelope though your door, if you put junk mail (old fashioned paper based stuff, remember that?) in a brown envelope with a business frank mark on it, I’ll probably open it, if you adorn your envelope with ads and address it to “the home owner” you’re making it easy for me to select what goes stright to the shredder!