[WikiEN-l] OT gmail spam increase?

[David Gerard]

On 28/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry to post such an incredibly lame off topic. Over the last week,
> the amount of spam getting through gmail's filters has gone up hugely
> for me. It's coming in through the 5 or so email addresses I have that
> forward to the same account in equal measure, so I can't blame one
> email address suddenly getting extra exposure. Has anyone else
> experienced like this? I was previously getting around 1 spam a day
> making it through the filter, but now it's like 10 or even more per
> day.


The spammers are indeed getting smarter. But I'm still getting < 0.5%
that makes it into my inbox, rather than getting caught in the spam
filter. I press the "report spam" button with great glee.


>Lots of it is a weird, right-justified format, all nonsense text
> (jumbled quotations from something or other) whose purpose I can't
> divine...


A lot of that is masses of text to clog spam filters that work on word
frequency, with the actual content in an image at the end.

(I wonder if there's some sort of online encyclopedia that might have
information on this sort of thing.)


- d.