Recent Tough Spam Campaigns

Considering that SpamButcher was originally an effort to cope with my own spam problem, it's ironic that I now end up looking at spam more than ever.

While the program works well enough to delete roughly 98 out of 100 illegitimate emails sent to me, I now examine those remaining few in detail. Consider that out of 400 spam messages sent to me each day, maybe 8 will slip through. Now, if you figure that I tweak SpamButcher's ability to filter email once every 7 days - suddenly I'm dealing with 56 different spam emails.

That's a lot of spam!

The first thing I try to do is break out the messages into uniquely identifiable campaigns. If 25 of the 56 or so all came from the same sender, there's a good chance other users are getting hammered with similar emails. Getting these larger campaigns under control present the best opportunity to improve user satisfaction with a minimum amount of time spent.

While I try to focus on filtering general attributes that might also apply to other unwanted e-mails, sometimes I'll add a filter just to stop a single campaign that's gotten badly out of control. For instance, in the case of stock spam campaigns I might block any emails that contain the name of the effected company.

Here are a couple examples of spam campaigns that I've found particularly problematic to stop.

Chat with me spam

While I haven't researched it, I suspect replying to the email would result in a follow-up advertisement for a dating or pay-to-chat website.

University degree / diploma spam

I've received about a dozen of these messages in the last week. SpamButcher's better at spotting them than before, but it's still not good enough.

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