Stuff I found funny, interesting, just plain disturbing, or for my own personal benefit.

Spamusement! Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines! Your Dog Will Love It!

Tags: comics, funny, spam

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Croak and call out,
“Bless my boots!”
In suchor snacks,
You order your food and take it.

You have ever tried to wind a clock,
But the machine one was satisfied,
And the king and queen
Of the in everything.

The great horns skirmished about
Orders that came so often now
For flowers to lay
To the charms of the cake.

That’s not 100% accurate, but it’s pretty close. Ever since I started using Bogofilter, the amout of spam I get is as close to zero as makes no odds. A little over a year now, and I think I’ve received two spam messages in my inbox. I do, however, get a slightly higher number of false positives. These are generally still unsolicited emails, but may or may not be something I actually want to look at. Bogofilter would normally flag these as “unsure,” but I turned off the unsuredness feature so that emails are straight black and white, spam or not spam. That eases my training a bit, and I don’t think it hurts the filtering all that much (on the contrary, I think it helps it in my situation). The only trade off is I still have to check my spam folder for false positives every so often, but I’ve set a threshold on it so only the stuff that’s really close to being legit is placed in there. Everything else gets shit-canned.

Which leads me to my post. I noticed a message in there this morning that seemed to come from the Royal Bank. Yeah, yeah. A banking e-mail. I know. Probably spam.

And it was. The interesting bit was not so much how official it looked or asked me to click on a link (that went off to some Italian server somewhere), no. The interesting bit was this:

We’d like to thank you in person for your loyalty – and take some time to get to know you better. Just stop by any Royal Bank of Canada branch or RBC Banks location on Thursday, May 31th for coffee and cake and help us celebrate Customer Appreciation Day.

I wonder how many people are going to fall for that. Clever… not good, but clever.

So here are the search strings that were used by said users’ browsers to reach my site from January 2005 on (in rough chronological order). Where a search phrase has been repeated, I’ve placed a multiplier modifier at the end of each line to represent how many times. There’s a bit of a common thread going here, and might also lead you to realize how such adware may have been installed in the first place. Ashlee Simpson screensaver anyone? The IPs have been hidden to protect the incompetent.

* used rolex wanted
* PDV-0700K (x2)
* ps2 hdd winnipeg
* crash bash
* heroscape pieces
* swoosh swoosh sound
* bestbuy.ca
* “never fly”
* leaf collection hose
* fly games
* penial implants images (x5)
* redd skull comics
* hands in my pockets spoof (x3)
* jeopardy snl scenes
* CJME
* fly with leaf blowers
* scrollable comments (x2)
* “guy fawkes costume”
* amazing race
* Korean girls
* clever firefly quotes
* haircut skateboarder
* humour old 80′s stories
* fly rider game (x4)
* o.c.disorders
* saber rider
* humour of accountant
* wqiki
* list of cooking shows of the 80′s
* 80′s sci fi toys
* savings in egypt in the 80′s
* 80′s weird songs list
* hentai girl with bandaid
* where can i watch free cartoons from the 80′s

I’m not sure which is more shocking: that my site is considered that much of a haven for photos of penial implants, or the types of search queries that will eventually lead to this post now that I’ve collected everything in one place.

That’s just the search phrases from the people “infected” with FunWeb stuff, which is a much smaller slice of the pie that represents my overall set of visitors. The other search phrases are far more boring (but maybe I’ll give the same treatment to those some day).

And if you happen to recognize some of those search queries as your own, you might want to try running Ad-Aware and some other kinds of anti-virus and anti-spyware software on your computer. And get your Windows Updates up to date. And stop clicking “Yes” and “Allow” to everything that pops up. Actually, just stop clicking anywhere on a pop-up. Forget that, install a pop-up blocker. Better yet, get one of your kids to do it. Scratch that, just stop clicking… period. Don’t even turn your computer on.

Yes, I know this is boring.

The number of spam comments is steady at over a hundred a day, and Akismet is starting to miss more and more (this stats chart might explain why). I had to moderate about 12 over the long weekend (all of which were spam). Another blogger has noticed the same thing. Following his lead, I’ve installed Bad Behaviour, so I’ll have to keep my eyes open to see if the number of spam comments dwindles. I’ve also read some discussions about another plugin called Spam Karma that I might check out.

And to lessen the number even greater, I’ve decided to disable comment posting on anything older than two weeks. I know you guys just *LOVE* commenting on stuff from last year, but sorry, that’ll have to stop. I’m putting my foot down. If you don’t like it, you can go to Helen Brown.

Since then, it has stopped 587 spam comments from ever appearing in the comments. Not a single one incorrectly identified. 587 might not seem like a lot for a 6 month period (the popular blogs probably get that in a day or, I’d wager, an hour), but what has been remarkable, or perhaps more frightening, and the reason for this post, is that just over half of those 587 spams were accumulated between yesterday and today.

Yesterday I got 130. What tipped me off was that one made it into the moderation queue, which results in me being sent an email notifying me so. Today, I’ve received 176, and another made it into the queue, both of which I’ve since marked as spam. They majority of them seem to be about appetite suppressants.

I’m going away for the long weekend, so we’ll see what the next three days hold in store for my little blog.

In related news, I recently switched spam-filtering solutions on my personal mailserver. During the initial years of running my mailserver, I never ran any server-side filtering. I left it all up to my client’s filter (in this case, Apple Mail), which worked for a while, but it seemed you’d have to keep refreshing what it had learnt every 6 months or a year. Then I stumbled on to SpamAssassin, and it worked fairly well, although it required a lot of upkeep, diligence, configuring, and tweaking. Based on some advice of a past coworker, I tried switching over to DSPAM. Using bayesian filtering techniques, it seems to be a holy grail of operability (near-zero configuration, near-100% accuracy). In my case, it would wildly fluctuate between 85% and 95% accuracy over the year or so that I used it. I’m not blaming DSPAM at all for that low score, as I know it was totally my fault. I was never able to manage properly installing and configuring DSPAM to be able to unlearn a message it thought was spam.

That’s my problem, you see. I’m not a mailserver guru. I know enough to get a basic system up and running. And no, I don’t know enough to be dangerous, because what I do know, I know enough about to know that I don’t know enough about what I know, you know?

Four weeks ago I switched a third time to Bogofilter, and so far it has been working like a dream. It’s another bayesian solution. I’m still training it, but for about the last week, I think I’ve only had a couple spam messages (which weren’t technically spam so much as they were “wrong numbers”). DSPAM was set up to place a unique key in each email received, when a message was incorrectly identified as “ham” (a false negative), you would forward it to yourself with a specially crafted email address that would tell DSPAM the second time it looked at it to correct its bayesian network (and vice versa with legit email it identified as spam, aka a false positive, which are far worse to get). That’s the part I couldn’t get working correctly.

In Bogofilter, I instead take a much simpler route. I create three new mail folders: one to store emails Bogofilter has identified as spam, one to correct false negatives, and one to correct false positives (the last two are scanned by a couple of cron jobs), so all the management is done by moving messages around the folders (after those initial cron jobs were set up, no more command line tinkering was necessary). During the four weeks of use, it has caught 702 spam (some of which had to be hand trained at the start) with only one being a false positive (which was caught very early on and hasn’t happened since). I’d like to report a nice fancy percentage number showing it’s accuracy, but I don’t comprehend the statistical reporting features, yet. I’ll take a guess and say it’s way higher than DSPAM ever was for me. And if it isn’t, it will be shortly.