Am I Paranoid or is this a New Approach to Spam?

Spammers have been getting awfully tricky lately, awfully tricky.  Here is an email I just got which makes me think it could be a spammer trying to confirm my email address.

Here was the email:

my name is debbie. we have a research about the different approaches in encrypting passwords and define each of the functions. can u gave me an defiition of direct substitution? thnx its me debbie again from the Philippines.

That's it.  No salutation, minimal capitalization.  Those were the first things that made me wary.  Now here was the address:

john casper [johncasper69@yahoo.com]

Hm....  A yahoo address.  And the sender is male but they claim to be "debbie".  Now like most males I am more likely to reply to a "debbie" than a "john" so that is suspicious also.  And it was sent to my scott account not sjohnson which means that they are much more likely to know I am male.

Now when I look at the SMTP headers here is what I see:

Return-Path: <johncasper69@yahoo.com>
Delivered-To: fuzzygroup.com-scott @fuzzygroup.com
Received: (qmail 7265 invoked by uid 82); 29 Jan 2003 04:10:55 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO mail.ubaguio.edu) (202.78.94.147)
  by blogsafe.com with SMTP; 29 Jan 2003 04:10:55 -0000
Received: from jigz72 (pusit.ubaguio.net [192.168.1.11])
 by mail.ubaguio.edu (8.12.5/8.12.5) with SMTP id h0T4fT7i014698
 for <scott @ fuzzygroup.com>; Wed, 29 Jan 2003 12:41:33 +0800
Message-ID: <000801c2c74c$cb5ac280$4857a8c0@jigz72>
From: "john casper" <johncasper69@yahoo.com>
To: <scott @ fuzzygroup.com>
Subject: what is direct substitution?
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 12:13:34 +0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0005_01C2C78F.D891F4D0"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
X-MailScanner: Found to be clean

The headers look mostly correct but it is odd that a) it was sent via Outlook Express but with Yahoo mail as a return address (if you have a real mail client then why use Yahoo as your return address?) b) ubaguio.net doesn't exist at least occurring to two different whois registries although the .edu version does c) (Most of all) I don't know any "Debbie" in the Philippines. 

Now here is the really pathetic part -- this could well be a legitimate inquiry.  I am a published author in this area so it is very possible that it is real.  If they had cited "I saw what you wrote here (URL)" then I would have answered it without a second thought.  On the other hand, it is a generic enough inquiry that it could easily be sent to 10,000 odd people looking for confirmation they exist. 

Conclusion

This is the real effect of spam -- it has completely broken the "trust component" that used to be a part of email.  Lately I look at email from new individuals as if it was paper email.  I read it but I just don't trust it.

Notes for Sending Email to People You Don't Know

Here are some comments on sending email to someone you don't know:

1. Identify who you are i.e. "I am Debbie Norvalds, a graduate student in computer science at the University of XYZ".
2. Provide a personal home page, resume or blog.
3. Provide a reason why you bothered to contact them i.e. "I saw your article on X".
4. Make sure the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed.  Don't send from Bob's account if you are Beatrice.  That just doesn't make sense at all.
5. Don't pretend that I know you when I don't.
6. Proper use of grammar, capitalization, spelling and salutation.
7. Don't have odd things in your SMTP headers.  It would be very easy for an anti-spam package to have run a whois look up on ubaguio.net and then trash it since the whois entry is invalid.

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PermaLinks Fixed.

Fixed!  Thanks to Kasia for pointing this out to me. 

The problem seemed to be that if your Radio UserLand disc space gets too low then Radio will keep updating the home page but not create any of the permalink pages.  That is, ahem, an interesting approach.  On the one hand it does let you continue blogging but it doesn't keep the overall "system" running well in that permalinks are an invaluable part of the overall blogging system.  I can deal with the approach but the software should have told me of the problem not just let me blithly blog away like a boob.

Was I at fault for running with 1% free space?  Perhaps.  But do you always fill your car up with gas when it gets low or do you run down to the wire from time to time?  That's the position I'm in -- I'm perfectly willing to purchase more disc space since it is just plain easier than moving images around, breaking my blog pages, trying to fix things, etc.  The only problem is that I can't right now -- UserLand isn't ready to sell it to me AFAIK.  That is the reason why I don't use images anymore -- I'm running out of space (and I know I can host them on my own servers; it is easier to use the UserLand's server so shoot me).  I guess the only solution is to either bail out of Radio entirely or start ripping apart my image directory.  Hm....

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All Permalinks Since 1/24 are Broken

Someone just told me that all my permalinks since 1/24 are broken so keep that in mind if you are trying to link to me.  I'll try and get this figured out today if possible.  It may be because I am down to 1% free space (not the same as 0 but ...).

Ah Radio....

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