A disconcerting spam

Dec 04, 2006 18:32

I received an otherwise typical "Smart Money Equities" spam today... what was remarkable was that the sender line said "Dale Trotter ( Read more... )

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slutdiary December 5 2006, 03:08:29 UTC
That would be disconcerting. Dale was a wonderful - and tortured in many ways - leatherman. I was proud to call him friend, and sad to see him pass so young.

Him on spam? Troubling.

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i_maenad December 5 2006, 05:20:21 UTC
Whoa. That would make the hair on the back of my neck stand up!

Lately, my spam has turned insulting. The subject line is usually something like "Hey! Why do you have such a small weiner?"

Dale, bless his soul, would never stoop to such mundane insults.

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mckitterick December 5 2006, 06:25:04 UTC
That's just disturbing. Spammers are perhaps getting cleverer, finding real names and using them to contact people who are friends or otherwise associated with them.

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drwex December 5 2006, 16:49:28 UTC
That requires too much work. Remember that spam is a mass business. Tens of millions of emails sent at one time. That's why they can survive on such a low rate of hits - .4% was one number I saw. But four-tenths of one percent of 10,000,000 is a lot of responses.

Anyway, to the original point - spam is generated by software that is fed by a variety of sources including dictionaries, lists of names, and Web-scraped text, including names. So it could've been random or it could've been scraped.

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