Since my email address is public, I get a lot of spam: typically 100 messages per day. The Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail filter does a decent job of catching most of it, but there are still some that slip through; I also keep an eye on the spam folder itself, in case of false positives. Generally speaking, these messages fall into three categories:
a) Direct sales for dodgy stuff, e.g. pirate software and viagra pills. (I have no idea whether they actually send the relevant goods to people who type in their credit card details, or just take the money and run.)
b) Phishing sites, e.g. “this is your bank/PayPal/Ebay, please log in via this link to confirm your details”. (If you log into their fake site, they can then impersonate you at the real site.)
c) Viruses, typically either an attachment or a link to a website with dodgy pop-ups. Sometimes there are messages which try to exploit security bugs (by effectively being a web page themselves), but these seem to be rarer.
Tag: Valentine’s Day
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Tales from the spam folder