Anti-anti-spam spam: Spam is becoming plain silly

Filed in archive Spam on January 11, 2007

Andrew Graydon from SC Magazine likes his spam raw, so he doesn't implement any spam-filters to one of his addresses in order to track down what's happening in the spam sending world.

In his article Beyond V1@gr@ Graydon writes how spammers are constantly thinking of new ways to get their mail through, and very quickly adapting to any new obstacles security experts manage to conjure. There is even a phrase in the spam world for this, writes Graydon:

"As the anti-spam community develops new techniques, the spam community is investing just as heavily in counter techniques. Spammers are now implementing more sophisticated methods to circumvent the anti-spam solutions - or what can be referred to as anti-anti-spam spam."

All this made me remember how silly spam has become. The 'plain' spam e-mails are too long, incoherent and stupid for anyone to believe them, far from clicking on a link. Remember 'Guthenberg spam'? Why the hell would I even read through snippets of literary texts and than click on a link to buy diet pills?

On the other hand, image spams, containing stock tips and other trashy proposals, are getting even more difficult to read, because of the new OCR-ing techniques which most e-mail services started to use. Once again, why the hell would I find a stock tip which arrives with a black background, with crooked letters, and some orange and pink spots plausible?

I don't think people out there are stupid enough to buy into this kind of spam, so my next question is, have spammers forgotten what is the final purpose of those darn spam e-mails? Yes, people should at the end, buy some of your false Viagra, trash stocks or prescription drugs.

Anti-anti-spam spam made all the labor being put behind getting that one e-mail through futile, because the message is neither readable nor plausible.