Blocking mail from bad places

Tue Apr 3 23:57:31 UTC 2007

I can personally testify that, as a proportion of the "mail" I get 
through it, there's quite a bit of spam on MySpace - phishing scams 
(Adult MySpace Viewer), fake profiles designed to draw you to adult 
dating / webcam / porn sites, etc. Lots of attractive women claiming to 
want you to be their friend for some mysterious reason.

Some of it is quite sophisticated: full blown "instant" profiles with 
fake comments ... the smarter spammers actually make the profile look 
real (often lifting material from legit user profiles), and then just 
stick their spam in the comments (and of course, "comment" spam is quite 
prevalent too, as is spam that invites you to join "groups" that are 
front ends to other sites, etc.) or wait a few days and then spam you 
via "bulletins". Sometimes, it is pretty hard to tell what is spam, and 
what is not... I have an acquaintance who specializes in documenting 
these scams and tracking down the sponsors of the affiliate programs 
funding some of them and getting affiliate accounts canceled (I've done 
this once in a while myself).

Sometimes there's a strange mixture of sophistication and stupidity - 
plausible profiles, very credible on their face... all batched together, 
five or six "friend requests" at a time, coming within two or three 
minutes of each other at 4 a.m. Or two requests, from users with 
slightly different "names", and an identical photo.

MySpace does a fairly good job of responding to complaints and 
terminating accounts (sometimes within hours of their creation).

I'm not a dedicated YouTube user, but I've seen plenty of spam in 
comments on YouTube as well... this is a generic problem, with levels of 
vulnerability dependent on the architecture of the communications 
system, and the scale within which it operates (how attractive it is).

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:18:36 PDT, Scott Weeks said:
>   
>> What I meant was: when only a few folks use email, the spammers will go away.
>>     
>
> They won't go away, they'll just go infest whatever the people are using.
> We're already seeing significant amounts of blog-comment spam, and as soon
> as the spammers find a good methodology, they'll be Myspace and YouTube
> spam (if they aren't already)....
>   