Tuesday, June 11, 2013

New flavors of spam

I run another blog, College Station Roads and Retail, which is mildly popular (to put it in the best terms possible). I get the gamut of spam comments, including weird Cyrillic characters, false compliments, mangled English, and the like "My bгother rеcommendeԁ I may like this blοg. He wаѕ once totally rіght. Тhis post actually made mу day. You cаn not consider simply hоw much time I had ѕpеnt for this infοгmation! Thank you! Also see my webpage: herbal acne treatments", or "Fantaѕtic goods from you, man. I've remember your stuff previous to and you are simply extremely magnificent. I really like what you have got here, certainly like what you are stating and the way in which in which you say it. You make it entertaining and you still care for to stay it smart. I cant wait to learn far more from you. This is actually a tremendous web site. Here is my web site - dog seat".

These of course, go straight to the spam folder automatically (the porn-related ones, definitely) and don't mess up the main posts, and I get just get enough real comments to make it worth it (occasionally spam isn't automatically caught, but all comments are filtered). This is what wound up in my email box today. The flags that went up is that it was sent through SMTP, which means the email address is spoofed and not legitimate.

Secondly, the email body has absolutely nothing to do with the blog post whatsoever, another red flag.

"Celine James celine.james87@gmail.com via smtp.com

10:39 AM (2 hours ago)

to me
Hi there,

I wanted to reach out and connect with you about an in-depth interactive guidebook that aims to help students decide if furthering their education and going to graduate school is the right thing for their future and/or career.

I came across this post on your site: csroadsandretail.blogspot.com/2011/09/waco-temple-killeen-bcs.html - and given that you might have an interest in the topic, I wanted to see if you'd be interested in taking a look and/or sharing the piece with your readers. If so, let me know and I'd love to pass it along!

Thanks,
Celine"


Well played, spammer...but I'm smarter.