Tom McGee's Blog

The other day I posted a sum­mary of a more pop­u­lar blog than this (what isn’t, at least so far?), and they were kind enough to link back. Besides gar­ner­ing a few more vis­its a day (thank you very much) I started get­ting a lot more spam posts. For­tu­nately, they’ve all been trapped thanks to a help­ful Word­Press plu­gin. But it got me to think­ing about fads in spam.

This week’s blog spam is com­ing in as a bliz­zard of non­sense words like “zockhntfz,” posted by users with names like “gvfq­cyjkoo.” Last week, it was all items that looked like reg­u­lar news or other post­ings, but with ran­domly embed­ded links to gam­bling or second-mortgage sites.

My home com­puter is a Mac, and the OSX Mail pro­gram has a great spam fil­ter. One-word sub­jects con­sist­ing of ran­dom but real words is the cur­rent trend, along with the usual one-gif generic drug sales and a gen­er­ous offer to split hun­dreds of mil­lions with the lawyer of a deceased some­one with my last name in Kuala Lumpur. Some things never go out of style.

At my last job, my cor­po­rate address was plas­tered all over a busy web site, so I got a few dozen exam­ples every day. It was like watch­ing the waves roll across the beach, as one tech­nique gained pop­u­lar­ity, only to quickly fade out and be replaced with a new one. I also saw a lot of refer­rer spam, which was triv­ial enough to ignore after I fig­ured out what it was. Though I did waste a few pre­cious min­utes try­ing to fig­ure out just where such-and-so poker site was link­ing to a finan­cial lob­by­ing group.

It’s an enter­tain­ing phe­nom­e­non to watch. But I don’t know what’s more sad: That there are entire indus­tries devoted to break­ing in and keep­ing out com­mer­cial mes­sages; or that some­one would find “idl­tegdw cxd­nfdfnhy klwz­fogkmq qws­nx­uyns himaht­b­jtbc” so entic­ing that they just had to click.