It might be because I didn’t set up all the mail accounts I had on the old PC, some of which only ever received junk mail and spam, but I’m sure I used to get spam on my ‘real’ email addresses too. The thing is that my mail comes via several different providers so it can’t be them all tightening up their filters at the same time. Not complaining, just wondering.

At the same time, the number of spam phone calls we get is increasing enormously. There is always somebody trying to persuade us to chase banks for PPI refunds, make a claim for an accident, change our gas supplier, or something like that. The other day we even had that company who try to con you into thinking you have a virus so you buy their anti-virus software. It has got to the point where we rarely even bother to pick up the phone if it rings before 8pm, and sometimes unplug it completely. I would even consider getting rid of it except it would probably cost more to do that because of the way the TV/phone/broadband bundles work.

Nearly every single bit of today’s spam consisted of trite comments like “zjHuBmJ Wow, you are so right!” from somebody who lists their homepage as Bing, Yahoo or Google.  I don’t believe that either Yahoo, Google or Microsoft would resort to such tactics let alone all decide to do it at the same time, so what is going on?

All spam is annoying, but is done for a purpose. In this case qui bono?  The onl;y thing it could acheive is to stuff up my site, but its an order of magnitude or three too small to be effective at that.

Dear Customers,

Please Note: After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined
that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of ?170

Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.
A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund please submit
the form attached to confirm the refund.

I expect a lot more are on the way, but always fascinating to look at the mail headers to see what route they took.  This one came from a drakemorton.com mail server.

I look through all of them to see which I just need to read and delete, which I need to read and file, and which need a reply – and how much effort is going to go into the reply.  Whether I reply immediately or not depends on what else is going on.

The other day I noticed one from a Horsham voter asking specific questions about the Digital Economy act.  I decided to put that to one side and answer it properly later on, and moved onto some of the easier ones.  The easier ones are the from letters from campaigns where I have already had exactly the same email from a few other people and so I know exactly how to reply.

This evening I rememberd I still had to answer that Digital Economy act mail and couldn’t find it.  I must have either deleted it by mistake or inadvertently filed it.  I have had a quick look through the most likely folders and suspect I deleted it, so now I am kicking myself.

It is not that one vote matters – and who is to say whther the person would have liked whatever I was going to say anyway – but its the principle.  Somewhere out there in Horsham is somebody who thinks I am just deliberately ignoring them.

On reflection, there could be a lot more.  I find an increasing number of mails from voters in the junk mail folder so there is a fair chance that I might have missed some – but I don’t know about them.  It is the mail that I know I misplaced that is bothering me.

If anybody has emailed me and not got a reply – give it another go and I’ll try to be more careful this time!

So I now have to make sure I am a lot more careful when clearing out the junk mail folder in case there are some false positives in there.  Anything that is getting trapped at the server is really beyond reach and will no doubt look like me ignoring mail from potential voters.

What is bugging me is how I can get several identical emails, all generated by the same online campaign and so all having the same content, and some of them go to the junk mail folder and some go into my inbox.  It can only be that there is something suspicious about the senders’ email addresses.

We are all, I hope, familiar with the concept of URL-shortening sites like tinyurl, tr.im or bit.ly, well this site is a site that does exactly the same thing to a URL. It creates an alias for it, but instead of making it short it makes it long and scary.

There is no practical use for it that I can think of, but it is fun putting in a URL like www.skuds.co.uk and getting back something like  5z8.info/dicksonparade_u2y7i_instant-purchase and some days we just need more fun.

If I only had one of these comments from one person I might choose to believe that somebody who like to make a few pennies on the side also has an interest in whatever random topic I am going on about, but I refuse to believe that several of them are all taking a sudden interest in my literary efforts.

The comments themselves are harmless enough.  I am almost tempted to let some of them through, except that could open the floodgates.

Dear Esteemed Customers,
Due to management problems, your btconnect email will have to be verified by our customer service department due to large amount of spam complains.
Please verify your accounts by sending the following information or your accounts will be closed.

Full Names:
Login Name:
Password:
Country:

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
BTCONNECT CUSTOMER SERVICE

Where do I start?This is a tad more plausible than some phishing emails.  It purports to come from a sensible email address rather than some name like “Hilton.Q.Warthog” as some do, and the btconnect.com domain is indeed registered by BT Connect. It is not asking you to log into a website but to reply to this valid-looking address instead.  So why didn’t I fall for it?

• I am not a BT Connect customer – that is a dead giveaway
• Look at the post headers, or even just hit reply, and you find the REPLY-TO address is a hotmail address.  Not the preferred type of account for a big company, especially not one that is an Internet provider.
• I have more than one e-mail account and recived this several times.   I don’t have multiple accounts as an anti-phishing measure but that is a bonus feature.  Even if a totally genuine-looking email came from a company that I do have an account with there is a chance I would get a couple of copies which would show it to be a fraud.
• Whoever wrote this probably does not have English as a first language, and certainly not British English. Example “due to large amount of spam complains.”
• Don’t British companies tend to have ‘customer services’ departments and not ‘customer service’ departments?
• Anyone at all familiar with customer service attitudes in the UK would be suspicious at being addressed as ‘dear esteemed customer’

The clincher, of course, is that no company in its right mind will ever write or phone and ask for  login and password details.  I may be over-suspicious and cynical about such things, to the extent that even when I get mails from my bank that are addressed to my proper email account, use my proper name, and have valid-looking links I do not use the links – I log into the bank using my own shortcuts. Better safe than sorry.

Anyway: 4/10 for this effort.  Nice try.

If all fraud attempts were so transparent we would have nothing to worry about, but it appears that crooks are getting more clever and putting in the effort to cross over into the real world with their online antics.  Just read this story for the details.

Quite a brilliant scam.  The crooks set up a website that looks like a parking fine website where you have to download some little toolbar to see their own vehicle – but in doing so they download a trojan.  The trojan acts a bit like the Antivirus 2009 scam, throwing up virus alert messages and directing you to a site where you have to pay to get the virus removed.

To get people to login to this site there is no e-mail or dodgy link.  The address is printed on a fake parking ticket that someone goes out and puts on car windshields. It is an interesting development because it is a physical rather than a technical escalation.

This is a lot more labour-intensive than an email scam where you can send millions out with one button-push.  Somebody has to physically go out and do it.  They must have decided that the hit-rate would be significantly higher than with email to make it worth the trouble and risk.

It is possible to set your mail client to either never send a receipt or to ask you before sending one, but it is also possible to let it send these receipts automatically without letting you know.  How many people are sending confirmation that their mail account is current and active off to spammers?

Not sure how it all works though.  For it to be of any use to the spammers the return address for the receipt has to be a real e-mail address and most spam uses spoofed addresses doesn’t it?

Tonight I noticed that there have actually been all sorts of comments that I had not had any notification of so I started poking around.  I tried to send myself an e-mail from another address and it bounced, saying my mailbox was full, so I checked on the server, and it was indeed full.  Full of crap.

I while ago I enabled the spam filter on the server, which is a good thing.  I also enabled the spam folders, which turned out to be a bad thing because I forgot all about it and the spam folder reached the quota for the mailbox.  All sorted now, I emptied the trash and increased the quotas as well, just in case.

Apologies to anyone who has been trying to send me anything by email in the last week or so.