What’s with the spam filter these days?
Every few minutes my inbox gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful Viagra is (or how many times Paris Hilton has had sex with the Egor Maraev). Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra. Now these clever spammers are into jpgs and all kinds of other tricks to get through the mail servers. Images are hard to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. After all, there was that time a year or so back when I had a bad patch and found out how good Viagra is. But to have something every few minutes is just egregiously bad. Why this post? Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. In the times I were a novice in IT, one of the standard tools was American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII - a code for chars, numbers, symbols, etc. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? We made pictures out of all those characters. And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. You got it. It’s a headline, “Viagra - $1.10″ with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Those smart spammers have found a new way to beat the filters.