Today I was made aware of something that’s been pestering the Internet for ages. A trend that the pornography industry started ages ago, and has fooled more than one innocent web user. We all know how easy it is to make typos, both in letters, e-mails and when we enter the web address of the site we want to go to. This of course is really annoying, especially when we’re at work when we try to make this office friendly. So what is this method that so many use to fool innocent Internet users? Well, the technique is as easy as it is in terms ingenious. What companies do, is that they register a domain name with very similar spelling to a popular web site. For instance, it might be gooogle.com, googel.com, gogle.com etc. All possible misspellings of the word Google, that might get you to a site you didn’t ask for. So what happens when you misspell the domain name? Well, you’re taken to a page which in effect redirects your request to another site. This is something that porn industry has done for ages, and has gained them millions upon millions of unjustified hits.

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Yes, you’ve heard me. And it’s a phrase being used on the net more and more often, and with a good reason. Not only are we being spammed via e-mail, but spammers have found other ways to spam us as well. You’ve had spam on IRC for ages too, but it’s not that often you read about IRC in the press. But recently, you’ve been getting spam over the instant messaging service from Microsoft, MSN. The new trend for spam sent over instant messaging services is called SPIM. But the spam that is really getting on my nerves these days, is blog spam. Over the last years, blogging has become a wide spread phenomena all over the glob. The usage of blogs has become so widely used, that it has become an influence on politics and the media. You only need to look back to what happened last year, with Dan Rather from CBS who was fired after having been slightly trigger happy with announcing a piece of information that turned out to be false. The case was blown wide open by a blogger, that could prove with simple methods that the case documents Dan Rather had based the case on was falsified. But to get back on track, spam!

As I said, lately I’ve been getting an insane amount of so called comment spam to my blog. This means, it’s spam disguised as comments to articles posted on my blog. Of course, all these comments are bogus and contains nothing else than advertisements to online gambling sites. Ok, I gotta hand it to them. They’ve found an area where it is easy to spam, and exploited that weakness for all it’s worth. But for goodness sake, who really likes spam, other than those that gain revenue from them!? NO ONE! I’m getting fed up with deleting comment spam daily, so today I’ve implemented a solution in the form of a WordPress plug-in to rid my blog of this problem. The plug-in is called Spam-Karma, and is written by Dr. Dave. So far it seems to be working quite well, and I will have my eyes fixed on what it does and how well it works. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

And to all you spammers:

May you all die a slow and painful death, and roast on an open fire for all eternity. (reference)

Even though I have quite a decent solution running on my mail server to catch spam, some spam mails still evade my spam filter. Quite often I find the spam mails I get to be quite entertaining, and outright amazing. The stuff you get offered would be a rater long list, but for those of you that don’t get much spam, here are a few of them

• Cheap Viagra
  Keeps you going and going and going. Pretty much like Duracell batteries.
• Penis enlarger/extensions
  Increase your penis to the size of an elephant’s penis.
• Get your hair back pills
  Got a bald spot? Fear not, these pills will get you hair which even the most hardcore black metal artist would envy.
• Refinance your mortgage
  Yeah by doing this you will save thousands of $$$’s, we’ll even throw in a free Ceiko digital sportswatch. (they were out of Seiko)
• Want to lose weight; just click here
  We’ll give you a range of pills which will get you slim in no time, when the package arrives on your doorstep it’s just a text book that tells you to get off your fat arse and get out to enjoy nature.

Wanna help out a poor fella; “man, I just lost all my money” or “I know this guy that lives down in XXXXXX who seriously needs some money” or some other really sad story that urges you to donate as much money as possible to help them out. Yeah right! You’re broke, but you still afford internet access do you? Hah, pull the other one.

But recently spammers have been offering stuff that I never thought possible. Spammers actually spamming trying to sell you anti spam software. Oh my, what nerve! I hope they burn slowly on an open fire when they get in hell for all eternity. Just today I received two of those.

When I thought I had seen it all, I get a mail asking me if I wanted to be a minister. If I enrolled to their engenious program I could become a minister within two weeks, and after passing an online exam I would be able to perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, forgive people their sins and what made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants; visit correctional facilities. Now, just getting the privilege to visit correctional facilities almost made me get my credit card out and enroll to this great course. Just think of that, skip years and years of theology schooling and be able to skip to the fun part. Oh my, I’m sooo thrilled! Really, I am! NOT!

But here is where it starts to get funny, just the other day I registered a domain name for a friend of mine, as a gift. Just a couple of days after I had registered this domain, I receive a mail from a spammer asking me if I wanted to make money of my newly registered domain. As he so nicely put it; “I noticed through my searches that you had registered the domain ‘pumpingirony.net’ and I was wondering if you wanted to make some money on your domain”. I was going all like “what the fuck!”. Given the number of domains that are registered daily, no person is able to check up which domains were newly registered. So my bet is that the fuckers (read: the registrar) I used to register the domain leaked information to a spammer, which then again contacted me. This pisses me off. Spammers are the scum of the earth. If you are a spammer, and read this post I want you to know this. If I ever get my hands on one of you twats, I’ll cut off your balls and roast them on an open fire. That’s the least I could do.

I just gotta tell you, SpamAssassin rocks! For those of you that don’t know what SpamAssassin is I will give you a short explaination. It’s a program that goes through all the mail you get, and checks if the mail is a spam mail or not. The way it does this, is to do a series of test on the mail. These tests range from looking at what the subject is, to what is actually written in the mail, and to do checks to see if the mail comes from a source known to send spam mail.

Why do I love it so much? Well, when you’re like me and been on the net for quite a while your e-mail address(es) kinda gets around, and before you know it your inbox gets filled up with all these do you want cheap viagra? and do you want free porn?. This is stuff that might be interesting to an impotent old fart, but that’s just not me. I get around 200 to 300 spam mails daily, and since SpamAssassin filters all these mails away I don’t waste time. SpamAssassin also uses an artificial intelligence, which over time trains itself to become better. The result for me? It catches almost everything, I now see an average of 2 spam mails per week. It’s perfect, it’s bliss. So where’s the link? Well, there’s a lot of humour surrounding the topic spam, and here is a lot of examples why. Everything you didn’t want to have to know about spam.

Sometimes you get stuck with some problem that you just can’t figure out. Your server is up and should work perfectly, but does it? Hell no, there is some odd error that you just can’t figure out. In my case, it was a problem with my mail server. I could send mails, but no way in hell was I able to get any mails. At first, I thought the problem was my spam filter that stopped them, but looked through the logs and couldn’t find anything. But then I got to think of something. The domain my private server is on, does not use a real host. It uses what is defined as a CNAME, which means it points to another domain name. So what happened was that whenever someone tried to mail me, the mail got to my server but was rejected as being to the wrong domain since most e-mail clients translates the domain name into it’s real name. So all I had to do to get it working, was to enable my mail server to accept mails for that domain and everything worked like a charm.