Blocking mail from bad places

Wed Apr 4 18:12:22 UTC 2007

That makes sense, and matches up with my experience... you also have 
"amateur" spammers just doing stuff manually (as well as spammers paying 
people pennies a page to input CAPTCHA responses).

Another issue is that the unsolicited contact paradigm blurs a bit, when 
you have musicians and promoters and organizations with causes, etc. all 
asking to be "added as a friend"... the situation becomes one of those 
"I know spam when I see it." ones...

Ken Simpson wrote:
>> 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 ...
>>     
>
> At the MIT Spam Conference, I was talking to MySpace's anti spam
> researcher. He said that they see many profiles that look totally
> legit and which have been carefully nurtured for more than six months
> -- and then the formally legit profile suddenly becomes the drop site
> for a Phishing campaign or other spam repository.
>
> Captchas apparently help quite a bit to stem this kind of problem
> because they install a technical barrier that, while not impossible to
> break through programatically, at least delays things a bit and
> reduces the ROI for the spammer.
>
> Regards,
> Ken
>
>   