In my inbox this morning:
Office of the Honourable Minister Of Information Federal Republic Of Nigeria Tel: 234 703 440 0879
REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654
This is to inform you that we have verified your payment, Nigerian 419 scam practiotioners where Arested,your name has been shortlisted and approved for this payment as one of the 419 scam victims,get back to me [...]
PayPal just sent me an email (which you can see for yourself):
Dear Tikitu De jager,
Christmas is approaching! Still need to find some gifts for your loved ones? We show you how to find unique gifts on eBay. Also, find out how you can send money home with PayPal and stay in touch for free with Skype!
Seasons [...]
A couple of spams got past Gmail today. It seems they’re putting the spam pitch in an image, and padding out the message with random text. But the randomisation is getting cleverer, or else they’re scraping from some very strange sites… “When we last saw pesticide it wasn’t diebold. Then after messieurs or runt got [...]
I just received not one but two invitations to present at an upcoming conference, or even to organise a special session, should I so desire. The catch? It’s the 2006 edition of the scam conference that accepted a randomly-generated paper in 2005.
So I guess maybe the personal opening and “We are emphasizing the area of [...]
A couple of thoughts about trapping comment spam: my first idea was, add a textfield requiring a significant word from the blog entry in question. Simple for a person to produce, and in practise you just need to check if the word occurred in the entry at all, skipping a list of obvious stop words [...]