Leefe rates the world... » Email

We’ve been reading your internet, and you’ve been doing the wrong things

Leefe — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:07:08 +0000

Ah, the joys having a email address published on a web site. All the fun spam you get.

I received this email claiming to be from the “Internet Service Provider Consorcium“. With an attached zip file.

From: “ICS Monitoring Team”
To: “client”
Subject: Your internet access is going to get suspended

Your internet access is going to get suspended

The Internet Service Provider Consorcium was made to protect the rights of software authors, artists.
We conduct regular wiretapping on our networks, to monitor criminal acts.

We are aware of your illegal activities on the internet wich were originating from

You can check the report of your activities in the past 6 month that we have attached. We strongly advise you to stop your activities regarding the illegal downloading of copyrighted material of your internet access will be suspended.

Sincerely
ICS Monitoring Team

Pity they can’t spell Consortium. Their grammar needs some work. And shouldn’t their acronym be ‘ISPC’ not ‘ICS’?

I wonder when scammers will start to work on their spelling and grammar? Though, it must work for them to continue trying. I suppose most people just skim their email, so spelling mistakes are missed. And once they get the just of this one, they are too worried to notice.

Have a read of what other people are saying about this scam:

Fake perl in oyster, read all about it

Leefe — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:23:06 +0000

As it happens there is a man selling Sydney Rock Oysters laced with Viagra. His idea was to produce a super aphrodisiac. Perhaps a smart marketing move, unfortunately the same can’t be said about his Internet usage.

He has been trying to promote the idea through a website. And when an email from Google arrived saying saying it was the “fastest growing internet story since 9/11” he went straight to the media.

A story in the Sydney Morning Herald details how the wool was putted over his eyes.

My favourite quote from the story is:

“Obviously, I’m not dumb, if I’d knew there was anything wrong with it at that point I’d have gone ‘shit I’m not going to put that on national television on Sunday night’.”

No, he is obviously just gullible and didn’t think to check the email authenticity.

Oyster man’s Google-gram a hoax (SMH, 6 June 2007)

Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk email?

Leefe — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 03:43:48 +0000

Hormel Foods, the producer of the canned pork product Spam is trying to stop the dilution of its product name. It doesn’t mind too much that “spam” has become a colloquial term referring to junk email. What it objects to is use of the word “spam” in naming commercial products.

The EU trademark office has rejected its application. Citing the high count of sites using the junk mail meaning in Google. The second site when I checked was “spam.com“, the spiced ham fan club. So its not like it doesn’t appear at all.

I suppose the moral of this story is trademark your product name ASAP.

Spam-maker loses bid to trademark ‘spam’ (SMH, 12 Oct 2006)

Incase or In Case ?

Leefe — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:19:32 +0000

I have seen a number of people write incase when they really mean in case.

What’s the difference?

Incase refers to being enclosed within. Like “Incase that penguin in ice”.
Also spelt encase.

Where as in case refers to doing something ‘in the event of’ or ‘as a precausion’. eg “you better set the penguin trap, just in case”

What happened to salearn?

Leefe — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 03:31:05 +0000

As a displacement activity to studying I decided to train SpamAssassin with the last few months of spam email. Uploaded the mailbox of spam to the server and entered the command salearn and got the error salearn: command not found.

Searching the SpamAssassin site and wiki were no help. After a bit of googling I discovered that the correct command is sa-learn, hmm. But the SpamAssassin wiki didn’t even have a page about that. OK, searching for that as a title found nothing, searching for it in the text produced a number or results.

So for those people forgetting the dash and people clicking the title search button rather than the text button I have added salearn and sa-learn pages that direct to the page with the required info.

SpamAssassin wiki: salearn, sa-learn, BayesInSpamAssassin

Turn off HTML in email -HOWTO

Leefe — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 11:38:43 +0000

I prefer not to receive email sent as html. After explaining to people too many times why you should use plain text rather than html email I decided to write it up as a document.

Below is a link to version 0.5 of the documentation I have written. Why you should turn of html email, and how to do it in most common email programs.

Turn off HTML in email - HOWTO