February 2009 Archives

On a lighter note, satire site The Onion covers the economic impact of spam crackdowns in this video news report.

“Add me to your MSN, Mr President, add me to your MSN!”

Most high-volume spam is sent using a tool that randomizes parts of the message - subject, body, sender address etc. From time to time, you'll see a run of messages in which the spammer has made a configuration error, so the subject appears as $RAND_SUBJ instead of whatever the spammer intended. You can also often guess the general form of the template that the spammer is using by inspecting a number of messages.