The Undetectable Spam AND Is It Time to KILL OFF Free Webmail ?

One of the predictions from the recent MIT Spam conference was that a rise in spam filters would lead to a rise in "undetectable spam".  Yup.  I've seen a few variants on the classic Nigerian email recently that are pretty close to undetectable i.e. they're just plain text.  No urls.  No keywords.  Here was the body of the email:

Dear Sir,
I am an Administrative  Staff of the Federal Ministry of Petroleum
Resources,and I represent a group that is interested
in engaging your services as Manager for investment purpose,of a large
volume of funds.

If this proposal is acceptable to you,please get back to me,so that i can

work out a remuneration for your participation in the transaction
and also let you know how i came to select you for this purpose.

Yours faithfully

Chief Bola Bello.

(Line breaks, spelling errors and all that was it).  Yikes.  It is damn hard to block that.  It isn't even HTML mail with a tracking ID.  The one thing that gives it away is a part of the SMTP headers i.e.:

Return-Path: <bola_bello101@spinfinder.com>
Delivered-To: fuzzygroup.com-sjohnson @ fuzzygroup.com
Received: (qmail 5157 invoked by uid 82); 30 Jan 2003 14:13:12 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO mycomputer) (195.166.230.41)
  by blogsafe.com with SMTP; 30 Jan 2003 14:13:12 -0000
From: bola_bello101@spinfinder.com
Subject: PARTICIPATION
To: sjohnson @ fuzzygroup.com
Content-Type: text/plain;
 charset="US-ASCII"
Reply-To: bola_bello101@spinfinder.com
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 15:18:25 -0500
X-Priority: 3
X-Library: Indy 9.0.3-B
X-Mailer: Foxmail

If you notice the X-Mailer being set to FoxMail that was the mail client used to send it.  When I googled for it, I found that it had this interesting feature:

The Express Send feature enables you to send mail directly to the recipient, using the built in SMTP server, thereby bypassing your ISP. [_Go_]

So I could make a pretty good bet that if I've never heard from the person before AND they are using Fox Mail then they are spam.  But setting your X-Mailer field correctly is optional at best.  And you can forge it trivially. 

Why Not Kill off Free Hotmail?

So this brings me to the next question -- for Spam to be effective the responses have to be collected.  Since web page urls are going away for the nastiest of spammers and shifting to a "Respond to the Email" approach, is it time for free email sites like this "SpinFinder" to just disappear?  What spammers do nowadays is set up free web mail accounts in bulk, send a message blast, monitor the accounts for a few days and then disappear.  If they didn't have the free accounts then it takes away another key tool they use.

So ... Ready to give up on that free hotmail account or start paying for it?

Bias Note: I run a company that makes anti-spam tools so keep that in mind.

 

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Open Source Internet Portal and Virtual Library System

This looks very interesting: Via Open Source Internet Portal and Virtual Library System.  If you understand the Library market for software at all then you'll be pleased to know that it does support MARC records and in what seems to be a quite interesting way.  [_Go_]

And if you think I'm blogging it more because I want to go back to it myself that would be correct.  Interestingly they are choosing to license one of the best parts (from my perspective) via the AFGPL or Affero GPL.

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MetaBlogging and Human Moderation

The JavaBlogs site is one that aggregates different blogs on Java into one convenient holding place.  And now Kasia is finding that the JavaBlogs site just isn't working for her:

I really like the concept behind JavaBlogs... and for a while it really worked well for me. I've read many excellent entries on Java I may have (actually very likely would have) missed otherwise. Unfortunately, as is true with any growing website, the signal to noise ratio is becoming worse and worse.. and not in a good way.

When I first discovered JavaBlogs I read nearly every entry posted and most were great.. agreed with some, disagreed with others.. typical blog-reading experience. These days I find myself skipping more and more entries.. why? They're not about Java.. and many of the ones that are simply reiterate or link to previously posted entries. [_Go_]

I see her point.  Take a look at what I just posted in my PHPblog (the entry below on Bunnies).  Yes it was php related but the relationship was tangential at best.  It is almost like we need a "Related But Not Very" type of categorization.  Or a scalable value.  Of course the problem is that if it is human done we'll all just configure it wrong.  Perhaps we need "Latent Semantic Indexing" (this is a really excellent paper if you care about low level search engine issues).  [_Go_]

I think what needs to ultimately happen is that our aggregators need to get smarter in the background i.e. they still gather everything but show us things that we are more "likely" to be interested in.  They'll have to do this via some kind of background analysis (probably) of links followed out of the aggregator.  And then some kind of periodic training.  And this is a) difficult and b) far, far from perfect.

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Time to Dump Opera?

John's making the decision to not worry about perfect Opera support on his site:

On Monday, I downloaded the latest version of Opera for Mac so that I could test some of the problems that people have reported with the new "images: on/off" option that I'm offering on inluminent/weblog. Then I read this article on C|Net.

It basically says that Opera might be dead on the Macintosh due to the release

...

On one hand, I'd love to figure out how to make the CSS switching Javascript work in Opera browsers. On the other hand, only about 0.74%% of my readers use Opera on Windows or Macintosh. Only 2% of those users use Opera on a Macintosh. That's an amazingly small number. [_Go_]

I'd have to say that John is probably making the right decision (he chose No to Opera).  One suggestion that I'd make to him though is to add a pop-up Javascript alert on his site for Opera Mac users which at least makes them aware of the issue.  This at least takes the burden off himself.

(And I suspect that there is still some market for Opera but it may be more as an embedded browser than as a general purpose computer browser).

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A PHP Guy Who Makes Cartoons or "The Bunny Files"

Although geeks know this all too well, stereotypes persist.  Forget the image of nerds who are one dimensional and not creative.  Here's some who is into php and makes cartoons.  Very cool (and check out this too).  [_Go_]

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Are Single Men Savages?

I have a potential client stopping by today to discuss their website.  Since I work from home this means that I have a potential client in my home.  Now I am a 35 year old, single male.  And while I am not a savage by any means, I find myself cleaning more than usual.  Why?  Um... The client is female and I suspect that I'll be graded on a stricter score than I would if it was a potential male client stopping by.  The last time a potential male client stopped by I did like 1/3 the work and just made a self deprecating comment like "Bear in mind I'm a bachelor and live alone".  He just laughed and was utterly cool with it.  When I asked a female friend about it she commented to the effect of "Women apply will infer that if the environment isn't spotless then you won't be detail oriented in your work".

Comments?  Am I nuts to care more when the potential client is a woman?  Or is it that single men are savages?  Certainly when I have lived with people in the past then I have lived in a more "pristine" fashion.

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