Email is on my mind lately. We get a lot of it and most of it falls into the spam, advertising, useless categories. Some of it is amusing, some frightens me. Most of it aggravates me. I do have a sort of guilty pleasure in looking through the emails that qualify as phishing.
Sidebar Comment: I love the sense of humor of the computer geeks who name things. Terms like spam, phishing, virus, worm, hacker … I appreciate the images they invoke and their descriptiveness. Phishing is a way of well, fishing. And to take it a step further that most fishermen can understand, its a way of fishing for suckers using a huge net. Take an absurd premise, for instance one I just read about recently, pretend you are a hired killer. Write up an email that explains what you do for a living, explain to the recipient that you have been hired to kill them, and offer, for a small sum, say $80,000, to NOT do the job. The real premise of a phishing plan is that if you send millions of emails, you only need one or two to pay off. Its the old $1 chain letter theory … I can make a pretty good paycheck if only a small percentage of people respond.
Anyway, if your junk mail or spam seems to be getting worse, it is. Spammers are constantly coming up with ways to get around any junk mail filters we might add. We used to be able to just build a filter of words we didnt want to appear in our email, and anything with one of those words would get trashed before we saw it. Consider the unfortunate law firm chosen to represent the pharmaceutical company Merck concerning lawsuits involving the drug Vioxx! I wonder how many of their perfectly legitimate emails actually got through!
One of the reasons you are once again seeing an onslaught of junk email is that spammers are pretty good problem solvers. I can just imagine their brainstorming sessions if users are filtering for certain words we have to use, how can we get around that. In other words, what will ALWAYS go through a filter? Pictures! Now, spammers just take a picture of the message they want to send you. Your filters and your email programs cant tell the difference between a picture of a junk message about Viagra and a picture of your favorite grandchild. Theyre both going to land in your IN box!
I have no answers, but everyone feels your pain! Consider Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, MI. According to an article I read in InformationWeek, this school gets 1.2 million incoming messages per day. Read that again, 1.2 million (per day). As they say in the infomercials on TV … but WAIT … consider this … 90% of those 1.2 million messages (per day) are spam.
Now thats a spam problem.