My Least Favorite Spammer: the US Postal Service

The USPS is expanding their Every Door Direct Mail "service." This is the hopefully-recyclable trash that shows up regularly in our mailboxes. In essence, it is spam arriving in my snail-mail box.

The USPS will not stop junk delivery since that is their new profit model. We are no longer the postal customers--businesses of low ethical standards are the customers. I can't help but wonder whether this plan to stem USPS losses short-term will generate long-term ill will. Other than just having to go directly from the mail box to the recycling bin every day, I have to look through the incoming trash carefully, as I believe that one time I discarded the water bill with the junk.

I'm old enough to remember looking forward to the mail coming each day. I like our postal deliverer, and like the fact that she comes through the neighborhood regularly. In addition to being friendly faces who often learn the names of locals, postal deliverers spot things wrong in neighborhoods and occasionally call emergency services. Maybe we could shut the postal service down and the federal government could take some of the savings and send communities grants to be spent on police officers actually walking through neighborhoods, as opposed to speeding through neighborhoods driving while interacting with radios, laptops, donuts, etc.

Around the same time the USPS announced their intent to further promote junk mail, our local mail drop box disappeared, making it harder to bounce spam back to the USPS.

• First class letters can be refused and returned to the sender.
• Letters addressed to valued customer can be sent back addressee unknown. If I'm a customer, and they value me, I wouldn't be receiving such tripe. It's clearly not addressed to me.
• Letters addressed to postal patron can be returned, because unless you are generating bulk mail, you're likely not really much of a postal patron.
• Unaddressed mail might as well be dropped in a mail box in the hopes that it gets to someone who wants it. Okay, just recycling it is probably better.

Related Polico article, USPS: We can't fail with junk mail.

Conference Spam

I keep getting spam claiming to be CFPs for obscure conferences, usually in India, but sometimes in east Asia. I assume that the conferences are bogus since (a) they resort to spam for publicity, rather than using legitimate channels such as professional societies, (b) their URLs are bogus, and I've never heard any of them.

Here's one of the current batch:

*The Fifth International Conference on Network Security & Applications (CNSA-2012)*
http://coneco2009.com/cnsa2012/index.html

Why does the domain name refer to a 2009 conference? Click the link? I don't think so.

Spamming, Phishing, Authentication, and Privacy: it's not 2004 Anymore

I was just reading the Inside Risks column in the December 2004 CACM, and was struck by the opening statement: "It isn't news to most readers that email is becoming almost unusable." This was largely because of spam and phishing.

Kids these days have no idea how good they have it [ insert emoticon ]. Spam and phishing are almost non-problems for me now that both my personal and work e-mail accounts are hosted by Google. Gmail's spam filtering is excellent and even on the off chance that I have a look at a spam message, Google is good about flagging e-mail as possible forgeries, possible phishing, etc. Just a year and a half ago thing were not so good, but that was largely because UMBC was hosting its own e-mail, and occasionally e-mail from legitimate UMBC users would be shuffled off to my spam folder by UMBC's spam filters.

There are two minor annoyances I still have with spam.

1. One is that there are a number of putative conferences that apparently send to mailing lists harvested from academic web sites. These tend to be in south or east Asia, and fall into two categories: outside my interests, or not prominent enough that I've ever heard of them. It's not that they are necessarily bad conferences, but if they were any good, why not get the word out through legitimate channels?
2. A former co-worker apparently shared his e-mail address book with a social networking site cum spammer [ yourfanbox.com ] that repeatedly reminds me that Tom U. wants to connect through that site. Or maybe someone broke into his account. Or possibly they are complete forgeries. Gmail categorizes them as spam, but still the first few times I saw the name of this former coworker, I looked at the e-mail. Of course, Gmail doesn't open remote images, so there should be no way for the spammer to know I looked.

Added 2011-10-13: the spam claims to be from yourfanbox.com, which claims to have offices at FanBox  113 West G St, STE 510, San Diego. There is a link to control future e-mails, but no way I'm visiting a spammer's web site. Not from my machine.

Spammers Protecting Selves from Spambots

It's pretty rich that a spammer such as DAMD would attempt to protect their e-mail addresses from spambots attempting to scrape their site, when it seems pretty likely that's how they pick up the e-mail addresses they spam.

DAMD, the International Conference on Data Analysis, Data Quality & Metadata Management, is following an annoying trend of other perhaps legitimate conferences of using mass mailings to publicize their events. DAMD is a bit different in that they don't provide an unsubscribe link, but, really, should one click unsubscribe links and confirm the spammers' success at reaching a victim? Usually not.