SPAM

Today, we got a spoof mail from someone trying to either get a government web page's information or cause the web page to go down. This is a common business to government web page. One of our people in the know tried to sign in to the real page and found it was being slammed by people trying to check their information.

The email was a cut and paste from the email that normally comes from the web page. The words that were changed, were misspelled. This is an indication that the mail you are looking at is not from a practicing company. This is also why it makes it through the mail scanning software. If you have an exact copy of the email from the wrong place, it will get caught and flagged. If you misspell just enough, it may very well not get nabbed by the filters.

The whole idea of SPAM mail pisses me off. SPAM everything pisses me off. Forums, Twitter, Facebook, they all suffer the same issue. Someone is trying to sell you something or trick you out of information. They do this for their own monetary gain. It is ugly. There are bad people out there trying to get you.

How to stop it? Diligence, persistence, Doing your homework. These, unfortunately, are the same things that make the spammers successful. For every trick the good guys come up with to limit spam and scam emails, the bad guys will counter in same. There is not nearly as much money in stopping them as there is in doing it on an individual level.

Computes get better every day of catching this stuff and figuring out how to stop it. Computers get better every day at figuring out how to get round the filters. People are less and less willing to sit down and hammer through the mountains of data.