Spammers Go Retro

The last six months have seen spammers go through a highly experimental phase in their existence. By this measure I would suggest that the spam phenomena hit its college years in the summer of 2007.

Spammers tried all sorts of crazy things:

Now it would seem that spam just got back from its post-graduation trip to Europe - and is ready to settle down into early adulthood.

Spammers are going back to what worked for their fathers 30 years ago (who I can only assume were also jackasses).

They're sending email in plain old text.

It makes a lot of sense. The reason they tried all those crazy things was to get past the methods the rest of the world adopted in order to stop junk e-mail. Six months later, everyone has set their email filtering to delete any message containing any of those kinds of attachments. What is the work around for spammers? Go back to what they were doing before!

Specifically, some seem to have caught on that all that extra fluff they were adding to messages was a major red-flag for programs like SpamButcher. Really, what normal user includes tables, images and a half-dozen links in their messages?

The good news is here at SpamButcher we still have plenty of tricks left in our bag. And no, I'm not going to share them all here.

Back