BYTE MARKS
Human filter kills plenty of spam

By Burt Lum

The number has recently been cut in half. Perhaps the anti-spamming laws are kicking in or the Federal Trade Commission is finally cracking down on spammers.

There are many types of junk mail. One type of spam starts with the word "message" in the subject line. Within the body of the e-mail would be a series of words that did not make any sense.

There would always be a short paragraph and a message.txt file as an attachment. It seemed bewildering to me why spammers would send this sort of e-mail. Although it successfully got through the spam filters, the human filter would immediately hit the delete button.

Perhaps in this case, just getting through was the goal. Fortunately I see less of this type of junk mail.

Another type of spam is the drug mail with funky spellings. Here is a typical rendering of misspelled names: X^an@x, V@|ium, Vi^c0`din, S.oma, Paxi1, V1@gra.

Somehow, this gets though the spam filters, which makes you wonder how rudimentary they are. Another drug-related e-mail would have "chilly premium duffel" as the subject and "UMSDA ApSproved MhedAs" and a link to Baghdad2145drugs in the body of the text. This might get through the spam filter but it should never get pass the human filter.

One type of e-mail that is of concern and consistently gets through the filters is thee-mail, that's fishing for confidential information. Thankfully, there has been heavy media coverage of this e-mail scam.

This type of e-mail can fool users into thinking it is real and can be the most damaging. I've gotten e-mail that appears to come directly from Amazon, eBay, Paypal and Citibank. Each one asks for account verification.

My rule of thumb: Never give out personal information except within a business Web site's secure and trusted environment. ;-)

Burt Lum is one click away at www.brouhaha.net.