Spam-a-lot

I am using GMail since over two years now, and up to now it did a good job of sorting the spam into the spam folder, and the non-spam into my inbox. With my e-mail address being prominently displayed on this site, I get a lot of spam, up to 100 per day. But as long as it goes into the spam folder automatically, I just click on the spam folder, click delete all, and I'm rid of it. GMail spam filtering presumably works by comparing your mail with the mail of other GMail users, and if enough other people marked that mail as spam, it gets sorted into the spam folder. That works well as long as the spammer sends the same mail to thousands of recipients, and thus the chance of somebody else having received the same mail as you, and having identified it as spam, is high.

But since a few weeks I get a new *type* of spam. It looks like random text copied and pasted from books, plus a picture file which contains the actual spam advertising. And GMail seems to have trouble identifying these mails as spam. I wonder if the spammer is sending a *different* random text, with the same spam image attached, to his recipients list. That shouldn't be all that hard with some software. And because the text in each mail is different, and doesn't contain typical spam keywords, it is hard to identify as spam by the anti-spam software.

Well, GMail is still doing better than my McAfee Spamkiller on my secret private e-mail account. That one gets very little spam. But yesterday I had two mails, one World of Warcraft newsletter from Blizzard, and one of those random text plus spam image spam mails. Spamkiller promptly put the spam in my inbox and the newsletter into the spam folder. :) I just hope that GMail never sorts real mail into the spam folder, because I usually don't even look at the spam before deleting it.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:28 PM Permanent Link