Friday, January 19, 2007

Ordinarily, I approve of everything that helps fight spam -- but some measures are bound to be abused or co-opted.

Yesterday I received an automated e-mail on behalf of an unknown woman in Australia. It claimed she received a message from my e-mail address bearing the subject line: "Are you sure you having enough size." I know I sent her no such message, since I avoid writing that kind of subject line in order to keep my mail out of recipients' spam filters.

The autoresponder message I received appeared to be generated by the Friends System. It asked me to authenticate my email address. Over the past few weeks I've been getting more and more such requests.

Of course I did not reply. First, since I didn't send this person any messages, this appears to be an attempt to harvest active e-mail addresses. Second, I do not need to be in the "friends system" of a person I do not know.

What makes me worried is that this kind of messages gets through the spam filter of my Google Gmail account. According to Google, many Gmail users get about 20,000 and 30,000 spam messages per month. In my experience, the Gmail spam filter rarely makes mistakes, so I never check my spam folder. Rather, I just deal with a small amount of spam that is not caught -- a process that helps refine the spam filter.

From now on, I will consider these authentication messages as spam. I just hope that not too many of my real friends are going to use this annoying system.

E-mail this item | Add Your Comments | QuickLink this item: A116816



E-Media Tidbits Archive

View items published between:		and
	(MM/DD/YYYY)		(MM/DD/YYYY)

MAIN | Back to Top