Why is it the only junk e-mails that make it through all my spam filters are about penis enlargement and ED?
Tag archives for spam
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
Best spam e-mail of the morning
Best spam e-mail of the morning: "oh yes, you are the fucker!"
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
How the hell did that happen?
One of the greatest (currently) unaddressed issues in WordPress is that there's no way to moderate user registrations. There are only two settings: anyone can register themselves (the administrator will be notified) and only the administrator creates registrations. There's no in between and no hooks for changing this with a plugin. I leave registrations open so new readers can create an account whenever they want. The problem is that spam bots will also generate registrations. I get three or four spam bots trying to register each week.
If the user name or e-mail isn't obviously spammy, I'll send an e-mail asking for confirmation. If I don't get that confirmation (and I rarely do), then I know it's spam. Here are the e-mails from the latest instance.
The automatic notification:
New user registration on your blog A Feast of Crumbs:
Username: John Doe
E-mail: nondescriptmail@majorisp.com
My challenge:
Hi!
Are you a spam bot?
I get a lot of bogus registrations. If you do not respond to this message, I will assume yours is one of them and will delete your account.
The registrant's response to my challenge:
No I'm not a spam bot. Don't even know what that is. I just got this card from Philip Morris to sign for savings and coupouns for my smokes. I went to the web site it said to and this is where I ended up. So if I'm on the wrong site pllease let me know so I can get to where I need to be. I smoke Marlboros and have for 30 plus years. I just would like to get some coupons mailed to me.
Thanx John
Next from me:
Oh! Somehow you ended way offtrack, friend. You registered on my blog at feastofcrumbs.com. I think what you're looking for is http://www.smokersignup.com/ That's where you sign up for coupons for Philip Morris products.
Next from him:
Hey, Thanx alot friend. I appreciate the info.
Wow. Dude was really lost. I should have asked for his credit card number to confirm his age.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
From my spambox
From my spambox: Maestro Penis. Yes, that is useful information. I often find myself conducting an orchestra with my cock.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Not every post deserves a clever title
Yesterday I had one of my semi-regular customers visit. This guy's got a strange set of circumstances happening. He's a white guy. He's unmistakably Caucasian. Yet he and his New Zealander wife (love that Kiwi accent) live on an Indian reservation. The guy paid for his service with a check. His bank is in Ohio, but his address on the check is New Mexico.
Me: New Mexico?
Alan: Yeah, I teach at Western New Mexico University now.
Me: Really? Kind of a long commute.
Alan: Yeah it's a three day drive.
Me: Umm… ok.
The guy is keeping his house in the mid-west and driving back and forth to his job in New Mexico. That's easily the longest commute I've ever heard of.
My mom called me at work yesterday saying she wanted to stop by to see me. Immediately I was thinking mama drama. You know the expression. If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
But no, there was no drama. My mom was sorting through her great piles of junk and found something of an heirloom: my father's "yearbook" from when he went through basic training for the Navy in 1968. After apparently wrestling with the idea for two months, she finally decided to give it to me.
I'm so glad she did.
My father looks so young in those photos. He was only 19 or 20 then. Those pictures were from years before I was born, before he'd even met my mother.
Somebody stole our damn trash can. The company contracted by the city for trash pick up provides specific trash cans for us to use. Three different sizes are available, each at a different rate. I came home from work yesterday to find that some bitch had switched our large size can for a medium.
So… Michael Douglas stole my trash can.
I've been getting hammered by comment spam this week. In just a few days I've had at least 500. My filters have caught all of them, but it's still annoying. I do find it somewhat entertaining to read some of them. It's odd the kind of things that spammers think will catch your eye. Here are a few examples:
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drunktv free scat movies amatuer video
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fuck my drunk wife fucking drunk moms drunk yoda
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free tranny pics pregnant model reverse gangbang
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fat grannies gay teen boys brunettes nude
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horse cumshots athletes foot amateur masterbation
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forced anal drunk bitches japanese anime porn
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camel toe rate dog breeds daddy daughter sex
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mardi gras history anal vibrator amateurindex
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free bondage pictures lesbian manga gay oil wrestling
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mc pee pants girl peeing drunk girls flashing
Ok, first of all, how do these spammers know I'm so into transvestite grandmother anime foot scat porn? And second, how do they know my secret rapper name is MC Pee Pants?
Thursday, March 9, 2006
Notes on hosting your own blog, part 6
The Akismet plugin is a must have for WordPress. A spammer found me the other day and left 250 spam comments. All of those comments were flagged by the internal WordPress spam filters, but those filters still leave something to be desired. For example, each comment is held for moderation, which generates an administrative e-mail for each instance.
I've read good things about Akismet, but hadn't enabled it because it requires a WordPress API key. It's free and simple, but still an extra step that I didn't feel like taking. Now I'm glad I did.
Akismet intelligently analyzes all comments before the internal filters kick in, so all of my spam comments now go to Akismet's own administration panel for moderation. Akismet is worth the effort just to avoid the avalanche of "please moderate" e-mails.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Five things Blogger needs
1. More templates
Blogger has a fairly respectable selection. But it's not enough. Only when no one bothers to use their own dreadfully unreadable custom template should Blogger say they have enough.
2. A language filter for that "Next Blog" button
It's mostly kinda cool that Blogger is multi-language. A lot of people complain that the internet is too U.S.-centric, so it's nice to see that our friends in Taiwan aren't shuffled off to something like blogger.com.tw. But my fuzzy feelings of international goodwill do not change the fact that I cannot read Chinese. Or Thai, Arabic, Hindi, and German.
How difficult would it really be for Blogger to add a menu in each blog's settings? Something like "This blog is written in…" and then add a menu to the Blogger bar "search only in language…"
Sometimes the Next Blog button will lead me to a blog I'd love to read, but just can't. Like this one. She's a 17 year-old liberal bisexual Peruvian city girl whose blog title is "Sticky Nights with Beba Newmann and Company." And just look at that booty. I'd be reading that blog five times a day. Except that I CAN'T READ THAT BLOG.
Blogger is such a cock teaser, dangling that in front of me.
3. Spam blog controls
For a while now advertising types have been talking about blogs as a "guerilla marketing" tool. Yeah, that's great. For them. But I'd love to hit the Next Blog button and be reasonably assured that I won't be accosted with offers for cheap airfare to Sweden.
Some people might argue that free speech protections cover commercial speech as well. But Blogger's TOS prohibit using your blog commercially (although it does make exceptions for affiliate programs.)
Spam blogs are a blatant violation of Blogger's terms. And they're really annoying.
4. Stronger tutorials for new users
Ok, this one is reaching a little. But I'd really like it if other bloggers realized that punctuation is pretty much required if you want anyone to understand what you're writing, proper capitalization makes for faster, easier reading, and under no circumstances should anyone ever use yellow text on a white background or more than two colors of text in the body of a post.
This isn't really Blogger's fault, but I'd feel better about the issue if Blogger was making a stronger effort to prevent it.
5. More server capacity.
This is Google we're talking about here. I can search for "Siberian foot toad" and Google will sort 8,000,000,000 web pages in 0.21 seconds. Why am I still haunted by "The document contains no data" messages?
I am so getting tired of those mystery error messages. So if anybody's looking at a gift for me, I really want a domain. And a webhost. And several of these.