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Terry Zink's Anti-spam Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet

September 2006 - Posts

Golden Crosses Not So Golden
On Friday, Microsoft stock had a golden cross. A golden cross is when a stock's 50-day moving average crosses its 200-day moving average from below. This is usually interpreted as a positive sign for the stock. Conversely, a death cross is when a stock's Read More...
Instant message filtering?
This is an idea that I have been thinking about for a while and that is the concept of instant message filtering. I don't get too much spam on my instant messenger (I use or have used ICQ, Yahoo IM, Windows/MSN/Live Messenger, AIM, gaim, and Office Communicator). Read More...
Don't answer the door... we know it's our neighbors
A couple of years ago, I can remember Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates saying that the problem of spam would be solved by using a reputation-based anti-spam system. Mail would be allowed on the basis of the reputation of the sender. This would work extremely Read More...
And I thought we had problems
We here in Exchange Hosted Services get a lot of traffic over our networks, but it's nothing compared to what they see over in Hotmail. I was talking to some of the guys who do some Hotmail spam filtering and the problems they have are things that we Read More...
Lousy blogging in the past week
I've been away on business the past week which is why my blogging has been sparse as of late. I hope to get back to it more consistently in the next week. Read More...
Parking a car
Recently, I stumbled across an email with a flash animation that challenges people at parking a car. It's a computer game and it is kind of fun. I could get to level 4 before I had to move on and get back to work. Read More...
Spam pays, but sometimes we catch up to you
This story reminds me of 2005 when Microsoft settled a case against Scott Richter, of opt-in real big, for several million dollars. Spamming may pay well, but if Microsoft ever brings you to court you had pretty much be prepared to give up all of your Read More...
Can trading concepts be used in spam fighting?
Ever since I started learning how to trade stocks nearly two years, I am amazed at how many applications trading has to real life. Of course, when something doesn't quite fit I simply make my concepts looser until they do fit, but you get the point. In Read More...
Looks like Yahoo has changed their footer
Readers of my blog will know that I frequently complain about Yahoo's spam filtering service, Yahoo SpamGuard. They claim to have the best spam filtering around, it was in their email footers. Well, I don't see it in their email footers anymore. I wonder Read More...
Spam has no political affiliation
Now that election season is starting to heat up (in the United States) I am starting to notice a lot of submissions coming from people that are political in nature. These are usually fundraising letters or "rally-the-troops" emails from the Democratic Read More...
I'm hearing rumours...
Lately, it has come to my attention that we seem to be seeing a new kind of spam that contains only subject lines and empty body text, or limited body text. These types of spams are tricky in nature because we don't yet know what the deal is. Why would Read More...
Do people talk this way in real life?
One of the things that amuses me (amuse being a relative term, when you analyse spam the bizarre can be amusing) is the way 419ers speak. At least, it used to amuse me. In the spam world, 419 is a short-hand way of classifying a particular category of Read More...
Back to school, but not for me
It's now September and it's the time of year when students return to school. I remember when I was in school and later on in university, I didn't particularly look forward to September (with the exception of the year before my last year of university Read More...
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