It has been observed by many people that spam levels have shot up tremendously in the last half year. Largely due to bot-nets of cracked Windows PCs, which tend to make the older spam-fighting mechanisms like server blacklists ineffective. And largely image-based spam defeats heuristic analyzers like Bayesian filters.
Somehow even email addresses that I hardly ever use, and which were formerly completely spam-free, have started getting spam. I figure somebody I know must have got their computer 0wned. Crap.
I wonder now… will we ever really find a permanent solution to the spam problem? The alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Will I have to spend spending the next 30 years deleting 50 stock pump-n-dump spams every day?
Is this what Hell is like?
Hey Ron, would you like to enlarge your penis investments? If you do, I need your help in this business transaction, you see my late father was a business partner of your business partner and wanted us to work from home and make thousands of dollars! I need your offshore account number and you will get 15% of the profits generated by sending Microsoft this email.
Please note this is not spam under the anti-spam law legal notice of Uganda CFR21-11
Ha! I think my post actually got blocked as spam. 🙂
No, you didn’t get blocked. You just went into the moderation queue. I moderate 100% of comments, to guarantee that no spam will ever see the light of day on my blog, even for a minute.
But actually Akismet is such an effective and accurate comment-spam filter that I could probably turn moderation off if I wanted to.