Small Town, Big Ideas

Spam... Outside of Your Inbox

Spam sucks. Everyone hates it. And unfortunately, when people think of spam, they think of email. I can't tell you the number of articles I've read in the last few years proclaiming that because of spam, email is useless and will soon be replaced by chat, text and instant messaging, wikis, blogs, RSS, social networking, and the list goes on. Now don't get me wrong... I believe in these other forms of communication. I have a blog, I use IM all day, I'm a text messaging freak, we now use Campfire for group chats, I read stuff on Wikipedia all the time, and I've got a LinkedIn profile and a MySpace page. But I'm noticing something... while my email spam continues to decline, spam from all of these other forms of new-age communication tools are on the rise. I get tons of trackback spam, comment spam, and more than anything, MySpace spam. And not only are they on the rise, but in many cases, they are trickier and more deceptive than the spams that do make it to my inbox. Check out this spam email I just got on my MySpace profile:

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Subject: Hey Pat

Body: How's it goin? I'm Kristy, I just moved to the Blacksburg area and I wanna meet a nice guy around here :-). I moved here to Virginia a couple of weeks ago for work and now that I'm here I have nobody to hang out with! I read your profile... You're cute and I liked what you had to say :-).

I'm 24/F/single and I'm lookin for a guy who is a little bit older or more mature than me. You say you're 30 and you're cute so I guess you're qualified :-)

My friend Jen from back home suggested I tried using myspace to meet people in my area. I just signed up and my profile sux hehe. I do have a blog/profile page at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ... I have alot of photos and stuff up if you wanna see me.

I left you a personal msg on my homepage and I took a new pic for you today. Come check me out when you have a chance, k?

Lookin forward to seeyin ya,
Kristy

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This is unbelievable! This spammer (who is probably a guy running a porn shop out of his basement) knows my name, my age, the fact that I live in Blacksburg, the fact that I'm 30, the fact that I'm single... and that I'm cute (although I'm not sure that is a fact). Thanks MySpace!

Maybe email isn't so bad after all.

The Internet Axis of Evil

Some days I’m simply flabbergasted at how many spineless, conniving thieves there are roaming the Internet. These people are a real pain and I have no doubt that most companies with any type of web presence agree with me, although some obviously profit from fighting these villains (you could even make a case for my company being one of them—the anti-villain that is). A couple of months ago I came across a blog post from one of the venture capitalists that I follow outlining what he calls the Internet Axis of Evil. He puts the following into this category:

• Phishing
• Click Fraud
• DNS Hacking
• Comment Spam
• Link Spam
• Adware
• Spyware
• Spam
• Viruses

At Webmail, we deal with at least half of these on a daily basis—some, like anti-virus and anti-spam, our customers pay us for. Others, like Click Fraud, we simply have to suck it up and hope that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do their part in combating these losers (and just so you know, when I search for something online, I never click on a sponsored ad—even if its for one of my most fierce competitors. I’m such a nice guy, I know).

The Internet Axis of Evil is surely that—evil. But I’ve got one more that we need to add to that list. Signup Fraud. Signup Fraud is when one of these evil-doers makes a fraudulent online purchase, usually with a stolen credit card that they scammed off someone else, probably using one of the evil techniques mention above, like a phishing scam (a phish is an email you receive that looks like its coming from some sort of financial institution like your bank or Paypal—the email looks real, tells you to update your credit card informationand if you do... bam, they got you. Please don’t ever update your credit card information from a link in an email).

Just about anyone that sells something online has to deal with this stuff... but we’re an email hosting company—why would anyone want to make a fraudulent purchase of a virtual product? Well luckily it didn’t take us that long to figure this one out. They want to use our email hosting platform to spam and phish people! Go figure!