Enough with the Chinese Stock Spam Already!

If you're like me - you've probably been getting a lot of messages that look like the following:

Subject: Make the most of it.
T*h+i,s Tue+sday i*t+s C-Y.TV!!.!

G,e_t on C,Y+T*V Fi,rst Th_ing...

You know how the rest of it goes. CYTV seems to be the main company getting promoted, but other companies are also getting pump and dumped in related campaigns.

As you can imagine, blocking mail like the above is pretty difficult for piece of software that hasn't been specifically programmed to handle it. This is to say, no, SpamButcher has generally not been able to detect these messages with any meaningful reliability. Sometimes it would quarantine them, but only if other features were present not related to the message content itself.

I have to give some props to spammers. For a while they were getting lazy and my job was getting easy. The last few months have seen all sorts of advancements in the subtle, unethical art of bombing people's inboxes with advertisements to make a dollar. From my observation, it looks like a few aggressive senders are responsible for most of the new techniques. Perhaps some young blood has entered the scene.

My first instinct when I see a new spam campaign I'm not sure how to handle is to create new rules within the spam filter program's existing framework. This almost always works, but this time it didn't. I managed to block the messages for about 24 hours, then the sender made some minor changes which broke the code.

I was getting about 6 such messages a day, and I'm sure some users were getting more than that. The situation had become completely unacceptable. So, I did something I try to avoid doing. I wrote a whole new subroutine to specifically deal Chinese stock spam.

So, if you're a customer of the SpamButcher anti-spam email software, and your getting tired of getting these kinds of messages, download version 1.8e or later. I made it just for you!

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