Chuck's Blog

Alright, I’ve decided to around the middle of every month to post quickly on the current email spam trends I am noticing, so that I can compare them and figure out the best way to filter them.

So this months trend is: Invoices & Sales receipts pointing to wonderful “Canadian” pharmacy domains

An excerpt from one of the many messages I have received so far:

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please log in to <removed>,
 click on "My Account", click "Update" to edit your registration details
and uncheck the "Receive Newsletter?" check box.
Or unsubscribe at <removed>

The most notable thing about the spam this month is the subject lines of things like “iTunes Invoice #123456″ and “Sales order from walmart.com” which is significantly annoying for those of us who do actually receive iTunes invoices from Apple.

Fortunately this spam is easily blocked with simple text analysis, so its no biggy. Its definitely better than this time last year where messages were placed inside an image and required an OCR filter to effectivly remove them from your inbox with a low false positive rate.

And if you have more gullibe users on your system your going to have to try to restrict them from attempting to unsubscribe from the spam. Unless of course you don’t mind an overloaded server and complaining users.