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Monday, 9 June 2008
I received this email, claiming to be from Dell, and offering to give me a free laptop, just for answering a short survey:
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Monday, 12 May 2008
Some knuckleheads from the other side of the world tried scamming me (along with a few million other people) a couple of weeks ago.
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Monday, 4 February 2008
MS Outlook uses a “tracking option” which enables the sender of an email to determine when the recipient has actually read it. If, like me, you find this “feature” an intrusion of privacy, you can do something about it.
I simply use the following regular expression pattern in my spam filtering software:
REJECT = ^disposition-notification-to: .*
While someone requesting a “read receipt” doesn’t technically make it spam, the end result is good enough for me; their email just gets deleted before it gets into my inbox.
Thursday, 20 September 2007
If you currently use captcha images on your website, you should watch this video and find out just how difficult you’re making it for some of your users to interact with your webforms.
Friday, 10 August 2007
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:
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. 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? 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?
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