Blog Spams

Spam is an annoyance.

Even on emails that I know I have not given anyone permission to place on a subsciption list of any kind recieves spam emails. People have left spam replies to this blog, I even got a spam text message to my cell-phone the other day.

To those of you that are doing it: Stop it already. Almost everyone knows what a spam email is and are hopefully not buying into your spams or phishing techniques. In a three minute period, I recieved the same exact email from three different email addresses from three different people claiming to be a daughter of a rich businessperson that was killed and they need me (although they do not know my name) to help them get money out a the bank in my country (nor do they know what country I live in). Once I decided to play along in a scam involving a dying man in a hospital who needed my help, I first gave him false information and when it came to giving him some money to help get out a larger sum which I would share, I told him that I lived in the very town that the hospital was located. I said I would be happy to visit him and give him the money then. Could you believe that he did not reply to that last email?

Unfortunately, most of the "victims" are the poor, eldery or illiterate. I seem to get a lot of phishing from crooks claiming to be ebay and paypal - I immediately send them to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com -- I wonder if ebay or paypal really does anything with my forwarded emails?

I think that free-email sites should be monitoring their users a little better. If joe smith signs up for all of the screen names on Hotmail, AOL, etc., then does a bulk mailing from all of them, then changes all of the screen names every two weeks, then maybe something not right. I am not sure if they can track that type of usage by their users, but if not, they should.

Don't spam!

Ian Ripley