I haven’t done a review of the spam in my spam folder lately and it seems like a good day to poke a bit of fun while (hopefully) helping you to better recognize it yourself and protect yourself from potential scams.
First off is an offer to enlarge something. Actually, it’s an offer to shrink my bank account with nothing to show for it. Besides, I’m created in God’s image already. How can a spammer improve on that? 
Next is an offer to send my ad to no less that 37,221,932 “actual buyers”. Sounds like the opportunity for 37,221,932 spam complaints.
The next one is the same as the first — except this one is from an amateur who doesn’t even realize that you put all the email addresses in the “BCC” field, not the “TO” field. The domain name in the link is registered in the Phillipines and the site is hosted in China — how can you go wrong? Lots of ways…
Next up is Sebastian Foss. Since I live in Germany, perhaps I should talk to one of my neighborhood lawyers and get up to speed on German spam laws? If I get bored someday I just might do the world a service and take advantage of my gracious host country’s laws.
Next one: same as numbers 1 and 3, except they use corny slang to deliver their message. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard those terms… like middle school… This one is registered to the same nozzle who sent the third offer — and the server is in the same Class C IP block. Maybe s/he’s clueless but clever? Don’t think so…
In the next one, The Russian Foundation For Basic Research has selected me (and presumably billions of others) to receive $1,350,000.00. I guess the research business is booming, eh? Here’s a hint: use some of the money I won’t be claiming to buy yourself an email server so you don’t have to use a live.com email address for the responses. You also won’t have to use somebody else’s domain to send your email.
The last one is the most interesting since it is sent to a non-existent recipient at a domain I own. I host that domain at NearlyFreeSpeech.net which has some pretty awesome anti-spam tools in place for email — and doesn’t even allow you to “do” email there. Instead, they forward it to a different account. In this case, somebody must be trolling for domain names at NearlyFreeSpeech.net, knowing that anything sent to a domain there will be forwarded — and presumably read. I’ll have to talk to the service people at NearlyFreeSpeech.net to see what can be done about this.
This last one, though, is going to be fun; the nozzle that sent it has his site hosted in the States. Time for a spam slap, so if I cut this short, I hope you’ll forgive me…
Thanks for listening,
Tom
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