It’s okay. The tools that are in place here are tirelessly doing their jobs, preventing the crap from making it into the public eye.

But I don’t have the time to skim that kind of volume to weed out  false positives. I’ve got no choice but to simply delete everything that gets caught, sight unseen. It’s a harsh, but necessary, response.

It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. This’ll pass. It always does.

A recent study found that a vast majority of the money collected by spammers flows through a small number of financial companies. The best quote from the article is as predictable as it is telling:

Visa, the largest credit card company, declined to comment.

Go read John Markoff’s article, Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight.

Like everyone else, this blog receives an astounding amount of spam. Doesn’t matter much, really; the tools running tirelessly in the background do a pretty good job of culling the junk. But like a grease trap in a fast food restaurant kitchen the spam traps need periodic purges. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.

The new page collects some of the best fragments of spammy junk I run across in that cesspool. Besides the obvious giggly entertainment value I’ve actually found a perfect use for the material.

Ever get an unwelcome telemarketer call? Sure you have. Ever at a loss for how to respond? The job just got easier. All you need to do is access the Spamstains page and read aloud from it to your intruder.

Better than simply hanging up, you can waste their time just like they waste yours. And it requires no thought or creativity on your part, for my spammers have taken care of that for you!

You’re welcome.

The amount of spam I’ve been receiving on this blog had been skyrocketing lately. It reached the point that it was pretty much an everyday chore to clear it out. So, like many before me I decided to activate the Akismet (version 2.2.1) plug-in.

All was well for a few days. But then, out of nowhere, Akismet began calling my attention to an unbelievable amount of trackback spam. By ‘unbelievable’ I mean several a minute, sometimes. Hundreds and hundreds overnight.

Now, that shouldn’t be a problem because they’ll go away on their own after a period of time. But what about legitimate stuff? There could be some of that, and it’s important to flag it so Akismet ‘learns’.  Um, that’s what they say, anyway. The trouble, of course, is that the longer the list of stuff to look over becomes, the harder it is to identify the good stuff.

This morning I logged on to see 17 l-o-n-g pages of it. Something would have to be done!

Here’s what a typical entry on the Akismet Caught Spam page looks like.

All instances share the IP address of 82.233.30.32 which is linked to a whois search. If I point my browser at the IP directly I see a typical Apache test page – the server the offending server is powered by CentOS. A reverse-DNS doesn’t give any more insight – no other host names. Google doesn’t have it cached, either. The IP is probably spoofed…

The text of the spam changes a bit, as does the host name. When I point my browser at the host name, though, there’s some kind of content for just the briefest instant, but then it quickly changes to a typical blog has been removed page. In fact, every one I’ve looked at is exactly like this.

Whaddya know, onlinecasino21.blogspot.com doesn’t resolve to the IP address I mentioned earlier, either. What a surprise, right?

Anyway, it would be nice if Akismet allowed you to filter the spam and apply a delete all to the result. But it doesn’t, so we’ll have to take more drastic measures.

Turning off trackbacks and pingbacks (same setting) would probably work but I’d rather not do that. Blacklisting the address in WordPress doesn’t work, Akismet still gets it first. Here’s what I did. In my .htaccess file I added these sections.

And that seems to have applied the brakes. I haven’t seen another instance of this spam for several hours.

Another thing that just might be worth mentioning. I run several blogs and when I was activating Akismet to mine I activated it on the others as well. But this – my personal blog – is the only one that’s been troubled by this onslaught of trackback spam. I don’t know who I pissed off out there, but somebody – or something – has latched on and it ain’t letting go.

This is 777-3633. Please leave a message.

Then nothing. I dropped the call. The Caller ID, that unreliable, easily-spoofed feature of my POTS line, reported the call as Out Of Area with a number of 999-999-9999. According to the ‘net I’m not alone in receiving this call.

This morning I got a call from Nuance, the software vendor. I use a few of their products, and they were pitching upgrades. Anyway, their Caller ID came up the same way. Unrelated, I’m sure.

I’m beginning to believe it. Why? Well, so many people email me from Yahoo accounts, and each message of late seems to carry the same footer:

You rock. That’s why Blockbuster’s offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.

The text “one month of Blockbuster Total Access” carries a link that I’m not reproducing here. And why should I? Blockbuster’s apparently got deep enough pockets to get Yahoo to do that, they might just as well pay me, too. (I won’t hold my breath for their call, though.)

It’s nice that Yahoo notices that I rock. They didn’t notice that I already have a Blockbuster account, but maybe that’s because I haven’t used it for several years.

How about you? Do you rock? I’ll bet you do. Let’s get together and start a band! Get a few rockin’ numbers on iTunes and we might even make enough to rent a footer ad on Yahoo email.

Lately it’s been colon cleansing. My favorite is the one that begins, in part, “the average American has 6-10 undigested meals resting in the colon.” Think about that for a second. 6-10 undigested meals. In the colon. Doesn’t that mean that you’re seriously ill? By the time the… material… has reached your colon, one would presume that the needed nutrients have already been absorbed by the digestion process.

I could go on for some time. Certain foods, for example, seem to defy digestion. But I’ll, er, pass.

Here, have another plate of spam. What’s your favorite flavor?

An odd pattern had developed in the advertising that appeared in my incoming streams. Affecting both snail mail and email, it was almost as though my health had taken a serious turn for the worse. Drugs, facilities and other products related to various diseases, diseases which I do not have, had been increasing in frequency dramatically!

I brought my concerns to the head pharmacist, the management of the company (it’s a chain) and my credit card issuer. Their response was universal. Sharing the data isn’t allowed. [We] do not do it. It is not done. I must be mistaken.

So I took to using cash. And when asked to sign when picking up the medications I use something else – an X, some scribbles or a line – whatever comes out of my hand at the time. If questioned I tell them why.

After quite a while – six months, maybe more – the marketing trailed off. Today the patterns I noticed no longer exist. (I suppose they all figure me for dead, finally succumbed to one disease or another.)

I brought my findings to the pharmacy and credit card issuer and asked again about marketing and data-sharing. Again, each defended their practices. I must be mistaken.

The traffic in my inbox is of little importance. What’s more worrisome is how else the data might be used. I can easily imagine, for example, an insurance company increasing their rates, or maybe denying coverage altogether, because I have a history of purchasing prescription drugs associated with a disease I haven’t reported to them. Legal? Not today. But since when has that stopped anything?

Watch your data trail, dear friends!