spam, spam, spam with a side of spam

What's up with spam over the past three months? I've noticed a considerable increase in the amount of shit coming to my yahoo account (the address of which I use fairly liberally), but now my gmail account is getting flooded with dozens of message a day.

For the latest 30-day period, I presently have 1056 messages in my gmail spam folder (messages auto-delete after a month). That's a lot of fucking spam. Not all of that was automatically routed, though - I still have "report spam" anywhere from five to 15 messages a day. It's really fucking annoying.

Someone have an answer? A solution? I can make you (pot) brownies if you solve my spam innundation.

Well, you'll just have to stop listing your gmail address on sendmemorefuckingspam.com's guestbook.

What did you do that helped that address propogate so quickly?

I have no idea. I've kept my gmail address closely guarded, only used it for a few important things like bank account registration, etc.

As far as I know, it's not published publicly anywhere on the net. I am just a spam magnet, I guess.

that's the part that's not making sense. Spammers don't become psychically aware of addresses, so someplace you used it was either not secure, or existed just to catch addresses.

Or you pissed off someone who knows your email address, and they've gone and signed you up for everything they can think of as revenge. :)

breakingnews wrote:

I can make you (pot) brownies if you solve my spam innundation.

Kill the account being spammed and let me send you a new invite.

I'll send you my mailing address for the yummy dessert treats in a PM... :love:

Oh, I'm already squatting on four different gmail accounts. :) I use one for really important shit - forward critical messages/attachments to that account for safekeeping.

I would switch to that one or one of the others, but then I'd have to tell everyone that I have a different address AGAIN. That means it will be another full 12 months before my parents send e-mails to the proper account.

Forward all spam to [email]SPAM@UCE.GOV[/email]
Commerce department address for receiving forwarded spam.
I think they make Sally Struthers eat it. :headshake

Are they buildling a list of people who aren't just "going along" with the spam, though? Will there be special government mind control spam sent to you?

Lately I've seen a lot with misspellings. For example, "whore" = "wohre", "cheerleader" = "cherleder", etc.

Call me pedantic, but this offends me far more than the actual intended content of the message.

About a year or so ago I was also seeing some that used ASCII art to spell out things to get around the filters. I actually had a grudging amount of respect for this tactic, which I thought was pretty clever. (Clever enough that whoever thought of it could probably make a useful contribution to society if they weren't wasting their life generating spam.)

wolf wrote:

Spammers don't become psychically aware of addresses...

Oh yes they do. I run a small personal domain -- only two people really get mail on it. In total, we get about 20 legit emails per day. We also get about 50 spams.
The really scary part is the "psychic" spam we get -- now around 30 THOUSAND delivery attempts to random non-existant email addresses every day.
Here's the graph of spam delivery attempts over time, since early December.
I use qmail, which can handle the load, but the trend line is still scary as hell.
- Pie