Got a spam today (or rather almost got it: Pobox’s filter rejected it) whose Subject line is:

abuse, destructPon or wanton takWng of a ljfe. Qt vs a crome no less than burnbng the Mona LFsa, for there Cs always jus

It’s hard to believe that this mutilated passage gets through filters any better than the un-mutilated version. It’s like covering a tank with bushes and then covering the bushes with desert camouflage.

Some little while ago, I changed the name of a file used in the comment process, and submission of comments by spambots ceased. Comments are now open, until another wave breaches the battlements. I’m betting that the number of good comments that I won’t have to moderate before then will exceed the number of spamments that will get through before I see it and flip the switch again.

In three weeks I have gone through all fourteen hundred odd entries to this here work in progress, deleted a few, cleaned up the rest, corrected some broken links, given each entry a title (the hardest part), and classified them. I’ve tracked down (I hope) all the webpages that link to the old blog, found the entries cited and inserted the relevant <a name> tags, so that redirection works as well as reasonably possible.

What sort of busy-work shall I find next?

In other news, the comment-spammers have found me; I’ve deleted about a hundred advertisements for poker websites and the like. Wacky detail: the sites in question are often shut down before I know they exist.

Some of you are familiar with referral spam. The spammer issues HTTP requests for pages of yours, giving the advertiser’s address as the source of the link; you look at your HTTP log and say to yourself “whoopee, there’s a link to my site from someone I didn’t know about; what do they say about me?”; you look up their site and find that it sells, let’s say, referral-spam services.

Now I see a change. Previous referral spam has usually been from domains with cryptic names, hitting many different pages; they were easy to spot and ignore. The latest batch has a hundred different domains with clear names like application-card-credit-4u.info, each hitting three or fewer of my pages. I have not bothered to see how many different hands are behind these various finger-puppets.

It’s a much worse nuisance than before; finding seeds among chaff is harder than ignoring chaff among seeds.

I’m the gatekeeper for two small mailing-lists. For months now, nearly all the spam submitted to those lists comes from addresses of the form word21word@hotmail.com — e.g. in the latest batch chance21sunbird, church21lorraine, cougars21molly1, pedro21bridge. Why?

I am moderator of two lists which received a spam entitled: Nid the chiipaast mads on wab? We gut it! — evidently from a dialect which has lost most of its mid vowels!

I nearly received (but for the grace of Pobox filters, which are very good) a spam entitled more pleasure for you and her erasmus stairwell.
Is that what the kids call it these days?