Tom McGee

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.