Phishing in response to my posting ?

[James Wilkinson]

Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> In response (possibly) to my recent posting on this list:
> 	Firefox crashes after printing
> I received the appended message (truncates), which looks like a phishing
> trip, and might just fool someone whose English is not particularly
> good.
> 
> Has anyone else seen things like this?  

I don't think that it's in response to your posting.

There's been an outbreak of spam recently containing text taken from
computer-oriented posts. It's presumed that this is to help the spam get
around Bayesian filters -- the spammers seem to reckon that the people
who run the best spam filters will receive e-mail with similar technical
content, and they hope that the Bayesian filters will latch on to it as
"known good" words.

I don't know if the spam is aimed at the techies themselves, or at less
technical users on the same domains (especially if the domain is set up
to do spam-filtering on the server, with a system-wide set of "spam" and
"good" words). Those less-technical users might be some of the few
people on the Internet who don't see much spam *and* are on the spammers
lists, so they might not have their cynicism properly tuned.

I've only noticed one such spam in my archives -- it was so malformed
that SpamAssassin (correctly) considered the entire message body to be
part of one very long header, and scored it up accordingly.

Even when spammers think they're being clever, they're still stupid.

Hope this helps,

James.

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