I hate e-cards

The general theme suggests, "I care enough to send you something on your birthday, but I don't care enough to try to say something in my own words to you, so here's something funny someone else wrote."

If anyone who's ever given me a card reads this page, rest assured - I'm not talking about any card you ever gave me.

My real gripe with e-cards however, is that they've always had a more than passing relationship with spam. Now, while I'm sure there are many completely above-board e-card companies, over the years many of them have been loosely disguised operations for collecting demographic info about people in conjunction with their email addresses.

What, you say you want to send donny_stevens21z@yahoo.com an animation of a girl in a bikini for his 28th birthday? Do you think they really aren't going to use that information? Usage agreements can potentially sign up both sender and recipient for a lifetime of junk electronic messages.

To be honest, my disdain for e-cards has probably manifested itself within SpamButcher's code base. There has been little to no effort made to insure e-cards pass through the spamblocker. I don't feel particularly concerned about this, as most other filters are also likely to delete them.

In fact, many years ago Microsoft was sued by an e-card provider when its Microsoft Outlook spam filter errantly deleted their email.

Now, spammers are distributing worms via fake e-cards. An email is sent to a user directing them to an IP address hosting a bogus website. It claims the user needs to install some "special" software in order to view the card sent to them. The software is indeed special - if they fall for it, they'll lose control of their system to the spammers.

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