Spammers on the rise
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It’s seems that for as long as there has been an internet, there has been spam. Just about any time I check and email there’s another annoying, obnoxious, and persistent attack asking me to sign up for a credit card, buy some medication, or any number of things I’d rather not mention for fear of the corresponding Google Ads that might accompany it on this post. Well, it seems despite my efforts to fight off the spam, there’s some sort of huge insurgence that is turning the tides in the spammers’ favor.
It seems like in the fight against spam we’re almost powerless. Nothing we do can really stop the spam, it just masks it so we hopefully don’t notice it as much. Now Google’s Gmail service is usually quite good at catching all the spam. The problem is that I have several email addresses stretched across multiple services. While the Gmail may be baring the brunt of my spam attack, my Cox Communications and work email are doing a lousy job of protecting me.
So since the first line of defense is failing, it’s up to my mail client to step up to the challenge. Unfortunately, Mail.app (the default Mac mail client) doesn’t seem to be up for the challenge. It’s out-of-the-box spam filter seems to be doing almost nothing. Well, that’s an exaggeration to some degree because it’s caught about 70 spam message in the last few days. However, when I wake up in the morning and there’s 10 messages that slip through, it’s hard for me to credit it for anything at all. Now the spam filter does have a “learn” feature that supposedly allows the filter to be taught what is spam and what isn’t by allowing you to mark a message as Junk or Not Junk. Unfortunately, no matter how many times I mark a spam, I find very similar spam messages seeping through.
Then there’s my personal blog. Right now, I’m receiving about 100 spam comment posts a week. While this may not be extreme compared to some high traffic sites out on the internet, it seems quite excessive for a blog that has a reader base of about twelve people. Fortunately, WordPress does give me the option to confirm all comments before posting them to the blog. This means that none of those spam messages ever see the light of day, but it’s still a pain to log into the admin page and moderate all those comments.
This whole thing is just frustrating. Spam has been around for what seems like forever, but I’ve always found a way to co-exist with it. I’m really getting sick of it though. I’m tired of having to worry about having my inbox visible at work for fear that some offensively titled spam message will pop up, I’m tired of receiving all the comment notification emails to my iPhone all day as the spammers attack my blog, and I’m just tired of the fact that there are stupid people in the world actually clicking on the links in these spam messages.
Spamming has to be profitable for these guys. If it wasn’t, then spamming would have died off years ago. I don’t care if you found the one magic spam message for a product that you actually wanted, don’t click the stupid link! For the sake of all things internet, just do us all a favor and search Google or Amazon. It just boggles the mind how powerless we are against these attacks. It’s enough to make a guy wanna give up email and the internet all together. Well, almost.
posted by Christopher Schnese
