Scamming the scammers

A few weeks ago I got a lovely email from an aspiring Russian bride who wanted to get to “know” me, so to speak. Even though her return address was in Mexico, her sincerity was truly touching:

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We sell America for the ruble!

I’ve been copping a spate of Cyrillic spam in the last few weeks, which my mailfilter has been happily dumping into the garbage, where it belongs. Here’s a recent example:

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Don’t send HTML-only newsletters

Does your organisation send out email newsletters to your customers or prospects? If so, here’s a tip.

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Ebay phishing scam

Last weekend, I got one of those “unpaid item reminder” emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here’s how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:

1. The "To" message header says "undisclosed-recipients". No personal email addressed to you would ever be sent to "undisclosed-recipients" because it’s a sure sign that it’s a bulk email addressed to a bunch of other people too.

2. The "X-Mailer" message header says "Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00". Since when would any business, especially one the size of Ebay, use Outlook Express?

3. Because my email client is configured to ignore HTML, all I could see in the body of the message was a single sentence which says "this message does not have a plain text part". I don’t know of anyone other than rank amateurs or spammers who send HTML-only mail.

These people are about as dumb as dodos. I wonder how much money they made last week?

I’m going to be rich

I got five copies of this over the weekend. It must be important if “Madam Cole” went to the trouble of sending it five times, right?

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