Oddly enough, the spam/scam entries seem to be my best traffic posts. Not sure what that means to my long-term blogging plans, but for the moment, it suits me well enough. Most of these come through my AOL account (which I don’t actually use for anything by IM anymore - same with Hotmail and Yahoo, BTW). That’s because the ones that get through Gmail’s filters are usually either image mail, which I refuse to unblock enough to see what they are, or vulgar, which I refuse to post.

Anyway, Rosalind recently got the death threat/extortion version, which is disturbing. I don’t know how I would take that, personally; it’s not like I know anyone who hates me that much, but the thought of it is creepy. At least I just keep getting the fraudulent fortune emails.

Read the rest of this entry »

After my last post, I was bombarded with trackback spam for almost a month before I was able to get rid of the spammer. The admin of the first messageboard I contacted responded with dismay; his board had been hacked and significant content had been deleted. The violation of his website (and the loss of so much content) had him so discouraged, he wasn’t sure he was going to try to restore the board at all. The next few didn’t respond, but the spammer moved from one to the next as I alerted them, so I guess they took action when I notified them of the hacking. Then he moved on to Harvard, of all places, putting trackback spam pages in one of their subdomains. At this point, I was fed up. Six or seven spam messages every day for a month is too much. (I know, the popular blogs probably get hundreds or thousands a day, but I’m not making a living from mine yet.) I did notify the webmaster at Harvard, but I also checked the spammer’s IP address and tracked it back to his ISP. After that, the bombardment finally stopped.

I mention this because it’s up to us, the haters-of-spam, to take action to stop spam. We have to work together to take away any benefit they could get from it and block them wherever possible, whether they’re barging into our email inbox or sending messages through instant messengers or using the comment/messaging systems of your favorite social networking site. I freely acknowledge that I’m not the be-all and end-all of internet wisdom, but I’ve been around for a while, so I’ve got some advice on the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

I guess I just always expected that someone who wanted a mail-order bride would be the one to initiate contact, not the other way around…

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting. Apparently my no-longer-existent PayPal account is in danger of some sort of administrative nightmare. Riiiiiight.

Read the rest of this entry »

Again with the British Lottery. Really, now, people, how many times do you think I can win this thing without entering one? This one’s not as much fun; still has bad grammar from supposedly English writers, still two people referenced in the email and a third in the return address, and still asking for my full bio for ID theft ahem, winner verification purposes, but not nearly so much entertaining filler to shoot themselves in the foot.

Read the rest of this entry »