I Got Knowspam. Now I Miss Spam.
April 08, 2004 20 | Comments (Closed)
Ok, not really. I do miss some of the more entertaining spam emails I’d get that occasionally cracked me up, but all in all I’m very happy to be spamless.
I’ve had Knowspam up for just over 3 days and it’s already blocked close to 1,700 spam e-mails. That, my friends, is a crap-load. My inbox is feeling so much cleaner!
Yeah, I’ll miss the funny titles, like “Nice candlelight dinner? How about a candle in her ASS!” I mean, come on! Who wouldn’t? And who wouldn’t miss spam like this? I hope he found his warp machine!
I guess I’ll just have to get my kicks elsewhere. Sorry spam…
Speaking of funny spam — am I the only one that was occasionally amused by what ended up in my digital Junk pile? Anyone else have some funny spam stories?
Filed under: Web General
Comments
1. Simon Willison said:
I like to check over Nigerian 419 spams every now and then because I find them so utterly bizarre. These are people who are trying to con me out of thousands if not millions of pounds, or potentially even abduct me and hold me hostage. It’s interesting to see the new variations crop up - I’ve had quite a few topical ones involving Iraq recently. I had my first French language 419 spam just today.
Posted on April 8, 2004 04:37 PM | #
2. Scott Johnson said:
While I enjoy an amusing spam just as much as the next guy, I personally don’t ever like to see them in my inbox. Any tool that removes spam from my inbox is good in my book.
Posted on April 8, 2004 04:48 PM | #
3. Lee Allen said:
I don’t think I’ve gotten more value out of $20/year in a long time. I’ve had Knowspam for a few months and have blocked about 50,000 spams.
I don’t think the problem is with how entertaining the spams are, but just that it gets old when you get 100 variants of the same spam. Any humor is well lost by then.
Posted on April 8, 2004 06:58 PM | #
4. Milan Negovan said:
Actually, I do have a funny story. Just the other day I looked through the source of some of HTML spam emails (I still cherish the dream of writing my own Outlook plug-in in C# some day). What cracked me up were DOCTYPEs they employ. I have a post (Spammers Push the Envelope of Web Standards) about it in my blog.
Posted on April 8, 2004 07:11 PM | #
5. Chris Vincent said:
“Real men use Viagra!”
I don’t know why, but this had me laughing for a satisfying couple of seconds.
I agree with Simon on the scam spam. Those are the best.
Posted on April 8, 2004 07:28 PM | #
6. Chris Vincent said:
Very nice, Milan.
That reminds me… has anyone else recently had emails containing exactly nothing other than the headers? I’ve received a bunch, and I’m thinking that spammers are just screwing with us at this point.
Posted on April 8, 2004 07:42 PM | #
7. Lukasz said:
Give bogofilter a try. It’s free and works smoothly.
Why pay 20 dollars if you can get a substitute without charge?
Posted on April 8, 2004 11:27 PM | #
8. DarkBlue said:
I have had similar success with SpamArrest and have written a couple of articles about the problem:
http://urbanmainframe.com/utilities/search.asp?keywords=spam
Posted on April 9, 2004 12:35 AM | #
9. Sian said:
Penis enhancements. It’s a futile attempt to get my to purchase and enhancer as I haven’t got a penis.
Posted on April 9, 2004 01:20 AM | #
10. pubarso said:
I have to agree with Lukasz. I use bogofilter (http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/) and it gets about 90% of my spam. And being a bayesian filter, it will learn from its mistakes and get those spams the next time around. Stupid spammers. Bah.
Posted on April 9, 2004 05:22 AM | #
11. Todd said:
I use Yahoo’s mail and it does a good job at filtering all spam into one folder. I actually do get a kick out of reading through them sometimes. My favorites are the insanely numerous ways that they spell Viagra, Vicodin and Cialis. I just picture a guy sitting at a computer in Sweden who gets paid per hour to come up with the different spellings. Must be like working at the World Weekly News.
Posted on April 9, 2004 08:33 AM | #
12. JP said:
Bogofilter looks interesting. Does anyone know how to get it working with Mail on OS X?
Posted on April 9, 2004 09:48 AM | #
13. Paulo said:
I get a lot of amusing spam, but I’m afraid to like it simply because it might encourage them.
Posted on April 9, 2004 10:07 AM | #
14. JP said:
Bogofilter looks interesting. Does anyone know how to get it working with Mail on OS X?
Posted on April 9, 2004 10:17 AM | #
15. Rich said:
Best spam I’ve gotten was for an anesthesia machine, just a big gif of this medical device with some jargon about what it could do. At $9,999 it was quite a bargain. Right now, in fact I think I’m going to hook myself up to it again.
Posted on April 9, 2004 12:29 PM | #
16. Lukasz said:
JP: bogofilter can be used along with procmail - at least this is what I have on my Linux box. However, you can combine it with any mail reader, defining it as an external filter for incoming mail.
Posted on April 11, 2004 06:43 AM | #
17. Dan Bowling said:
I like to use a free utility called POPFile. If anyone is looking for a hyper-acurate, very flexible program to fight spam and or categorize emails, I would fully endorse that program… I hope they still make it.
I seem to have been able to get rid of all the spam in my mailbox with a new address. The only thing I can’t kick is Real Media, Inc. spam– they don’t remove you from a list no matter how many times you complain to their customer service rep.
Posted on April 11, 2004 10:15 PM | #
18. Daryl said:
One of my favorite lines in spam was “There’s a piss party and you’re invited.” What exactly do you wear to a piss party? A raincoat? Do you have to RSV, um, Pee?
Posted on April 12, 2004 05:14 AM | #
19. Sam Walker said:
Mail.app’s spam filter has been working great for me – only about 1 message every other day gets through, and i just had to re-teach it a few weeks ago.
Posted on April 15, 2004 10:10 PM | #
20. donnam said:
hey thanks for the pointer. I got knowspam too. Yay!
Posted on April 22, 2004 02:17 AM | #
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