The latest ridiculous names from the spam files (yes, I know, this is the latest topic I’ve been hyperfocusing on):

“Upholding L. Unsanctioned”
“Spellbinder C. Stabilized”

Expand your educatíon Cody – bowling ball alchemists around 92

I don’t know why, but the mental image of bowling ball alchemists cracks me up, for some reason. I’m not exactly sure what you’d want to transmute a bowling ball into…

And the text of the e-mail was yet another one of those series of randomly-generated sentences interspersed with images that my mail client of choice doesn’t show. Heh. (Copying and pasting the URLs of the images, for the record, revealed that it was yet another ‘university’ ‘diploma’ scam.)

The full text, for those who are amused by these things:

(more…)

I think I may have found the Best Spam Pseudonym Ever:

::drumroll…::

“Blasts O. Booty”. I kid you not.

And to make this even funnier, it was a Viagra spam…

I know, I know, I’ve been posting a lot about junk mail lately. Hey, it’s not as if much has been going on in my life that’s worthy of note, so I figure I might rant about the mess that clogs my inbox every morning. Admittedly, the spam problem is made even worse by that stupid MyDoom virus. Although I have a server-side filter on my zone38.net mail accounts set up to block the virus based on certain strings found therein (see this F-Secure virus profile for the regular expressions to use), I still have addresses at other providers that are getting hit by it several times a day, and in addition I have to deal with the delivery failure notifications that are getting sent back to an innocent third party who happened to be in someone else’s address book.

Anyway, I found a couple of amusing spam-related weblogs while I was searching for posts about MyDoom-related annoyances. Because these involve subject lines found in actual spam, there are bound to be occasional entries that are in somewhat questionable taste, but in all honesty, I’ve seen far worse spam subjects in my own inbox than are mentioned on either of these sites…

First off is Kristin Thomas’ Spam Poetry, a reasonably successful attempt to assemble random quotations from the subject lines of junk e-mail into somewhat coherent verse. A bizarre idea, to be sure, but the results are actually quite interesting to read.

If poetry isn’t quite your thing, you might enjoy Good Things from Spam, an attempt to make sense of– and snarky comments about– the often incoherent and occasionally nonsensical non-sequiturs that are frequently found in the subjects of spam. Many of the comments on this site literally had me laughing out loud; if your sense of humor is anything like mine, you’ll probably find it hilarious as well.

Via the New York Times:

Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam

PURPOSES L. XYLOPHONIST sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality.

There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. The fact that his name appeared in the return line of a piece of unsolicited e-mail almost assures that he is not.

Mr. Xylophonist wrote trying to sell some pamphlet about maximizing profits on eBay. Or maybe that was what Beiderbecke P. Sawhorse was pitching. It was definitely not the one from Marylou Bowling; she wrote to tell about “Government Free Cash Grant Programs.” Then again, that might have been from Elfrieda Billman. As for Usefully T. Medicaids and Boggs Darrin, they both wrote about cheap drug sales, no prescription needed. (Of course.)

Incidentally, for those not keeping track, “spamonym” is, of course, a term I coined in a 20 January blog post to describe the phenomenon of weird sender names in spam.

The actual text of a spam I received today… I swear, eventually spam will be so utterly obfuscated that it will literally be unreadable.

Actually, scratch that; I’ve already encountered quite a few spams that were unreadable in my mail client of choice…

Subject: amigo mcclellan
From: “Dollie Lang”

Hi,

Susper chamrge your louve lidfe!
Ordder your Vaiagbra and Seupfer Vikagjra sahfely and securmely onlixne.

(more…)

Still more ridiculous spamonyms– that is, the pseudonyms found in the “From” field of spams:

“Instrumentals S. Scrabbles”
“Berlioz H. Sumner”
“Gnashing I. Superficiality”

Some spammers just don’t have a clue.

Here, in its entirety, is SpamAssassin‘s analysis of a spam that I just received tonight. Note that it got 52.5 spam points– I think that this might be a record for me…

Subject: FOLLOWING IS A NOTE FROM THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS PROGRAM dl o


Content preview:  DO NOT DELETE THIS - READ FIRST - IT WILL CHANGE YOUR
  LIFE! [...] 

Content analysis details:   (52.5 points, 5.0 required)

(more…)

I recently posted a list of the weird spammer aliases that I’ve seen in the past few months, but today I stumbled across one that beats them all:

“Doc Q. Capitalization”.

Grammatical snob that I am, I’m tempted to start using this one as a personal alias…

Other bizarre spamonyms (hey, I coined a new word!) that I’ve seen since the last post include “Accompaniments H. Darted”, “Undercarriages I. Citing” and “Hillock Q. Thiamin”.

The “names” used by the senders of a number of spams that I’ve received in the past couple months:

“Nouakchott M. Calories”
“Hedge C. Paramedicals”
“Plaudits R. Jarring”
“Licks C. Shenandoah”
“Individuality P. Dolefuller”
“Overplays S. Maryellen”
“Ungainlier Q. Math”
“Preachy P. Concatenate”

And more recently, I received a junk e-mail from an “Ophthalmologists Q. Stuccoing”.

Really… who do they think they’re fooling? Sure, they might be able to bypass Bayesian filters that way, but it’s rather hard for a human to be fooled by these ridiculously fake names.

And yes, many others have been hit by this particular spam meme; see, for instance, this blog comment thread that I stumbled across today…