I’m getting a bit tired of all the SPAM I’m receiving lately. Often it’s the same e-mail over and over again, purportedly from different e-mail addresses. I’m getting everything from porn to viagra ads to notices about debt reduction seminars. What’s really worrying is the amount of SPAM that’s coming to me through the DSTC’s student mailing list! The SPAM’s got so bad at the DSTC that the sys admins have installed SPAMASSASSIN to decide whether incoming mail is SPAM or not. It rates each mail according to the probability that it is SPAM. If the rating is above a certain threshold, the e-mail gets marked as SPAM and then each user can configure their own e-mail client to filter out the e-mails that have been marked. I probably need to set up something like that for my own home system.
Having a simple username like rick and a popular ISP like Bigpond isn’t helping much either. Often I receive e-mail which has been sent to every name you can think of starting with the letter R at bigpond.net.au. The spammers just take a punt that at least some of those usernames will actually belong to someone. The rest just get bounced I suppose. Presumeably they do the same thing for the letters A, B, C and so on as well. They also have automated trawlers which scour the web for e-mail addresses. Spamming has become quite sophistocated over the past few years. If any spammers are reading this, I assure you I do not want a penis enlargement or to be enlightened about nifty debt reduction techniques or anything else, thank you very much! I wish you would all just go away!
At least I’m receiving far less e-mail that was intended to go this other Rick person. My message that this Rick guy was giving out the wrong e-mail address to people seems finally to have gotten through to someone, probably Rick himself. So that’s a few less irrelevant e-mails I receive everyday, but on some days it’s more than made up for by the sheer volume of SPAM that find its way into my Inbox from all over the place.
