Recently, I have been looking at some of the spam emails that have come in so that I can fine-tune my filters, and some of them are beyond belief with regar to the stupidity of the spammers. There are some fundamental errors that the spammers are making which make the whole process of sending the messages completely pointless.

So here’s a message to all spammers…

Random Email Addresses
As I own my own domains, I know exactly which email addresses are valid, so if I get an email addressed to some randomly generated name, such as george.hackenbush@mydomain.com, I know that it must be spam. So my filters reject it straight away.

Random Names
You wouldn’t believe the number of spam messages I receive to phil.rogers@mydomain.com, which then contain a message saying “Dear Mary”, or something along those lines.
Ok, not everybody uses their real name for their email address, but many do, especially within companies. At least get the letter to match the addressee!

Those of you who use software to generate email addresses from random words are even more idiotic. Today I received a message addressed to MeringuesGladdened@mydomain.com. What a well-chosen name that is! There’s sure to be somebody in my company named Meringues Gladdened! I’ll just check…
No! Well, I’m surprised! Oh well, that explains why the mail server put it in the trash.

No Content
I thought the whole point of spam was to sell something. Hundreds of the spam messages I receive contain some garbage text. No mention of any products, and no links to websites. Do you just get off on cluttering the Internet with your junk?

Maybe you’re just trying to get people to reply to the message saying “you have the wrong address”. Then you know that the address is a real one. I think most people are smarter than that.

Invalid Headers
Emails sent with an invalid time and/or date are almost always going to be spam. Easy to filter out.

Unbelievable Headers
The headers in emails contain a lot of information that most people never see. One example is the name of the program used to send the email. I have received numerous emails purporting to be from companies such as PayPal, which were sent using Outlook Express. I find it hard to believe that PayPal would use this as their automated mailing system!

Phishing Emails
Banks NEVER send emails requesting people to log into their online accounts. Furthermore, they all use domain names for their web servers – not plain IP addresses. My email client program displays the actual address of links, so these are glaringly obvious to me.

Multiple Messages
Do I really need to see the same message, with the same sender and subject sent 14 times within the same 2 seconds? Don’t you think this alerts me to the fact that it’s spam?

If my bank really wanted me to log into my account, they wouldn’t send the same message once every 30 minutes for 2 days solid. They would send me a letter by snail mail.

Do you not think that receiving emails every day from almost every bank that ever existed would alert me to the fact that they are spam? I use just one bank, and so far I’ve never received a spam email purporting to be from that one!

Not Even My Country
I’m based in the UK, so many of my email addresses end with .co.uk. It doesn’t seem to stop me getting spam emails that claim to be from American banks. Although it is possible, it’s not easy for somebody to open an account in a US bank if they don’t live there. So why send your US-specific junk to non-US addresses?
Yes, I know you send millions of messages and you don’t care, but what’s the point of sending a message to people who have no chance of responding? Heck, it doesn’t matter to me either – it makes it easier for me to filter out your junk, so I never even see it.

Those of you who send spam containing advertisements and web links etc., must be making some money from some poor, gullible souls, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it. You’d do a lot better if you put your efforts into finding genuine customers and targeting your emails instead of sending out millions of messages to all and sundry, or to non-existant addresses.

A few months ago, I was in a Brantano shoe shop in the UK. I was approached by a member of staff asking whether I would like to join their email mailing list, in which I would be sent news of upcoming discount promotions before they were made public, special offers etc. I filled in the form and returned it to them. I was assured that there would be only about 3 or 4 emails per year.

A couple of weeks later, I received an email from Brantano. From the tone of the message I got the feeling that there would be more than 3 or 4 per year. Add to that the fact that they had mis-spelled my name (I wrote it clearly enough on the form), I decided to unsubscribe from the the newsletter.

So I clicked the Unsubscribe link, which failed to do anything. I tried the same link in 3 different browsers in case there was some sort of incompatibility, but it still failed to work.
So after a lot of searching on their website, I found an email address for their webmaster and sent an email requesting that my details be removed from their database.
I received a reply stating that my details had been removed as requested.

A few days ago, what should appear in my email Inbox, but a newsletter from Brantano. Clearly they had NOT removed my details from my database as requested.
I clicked the Unsubscribe link in this new email (assuming that they had fixed it), and it took me to a Subscribe page. There was no option to unsubscribe at all.

On the basis that

1. I had requested to be removed from the database
2. I had been assured that I had been removed from the database
3. I continued to receive emails from them
4. Their unsubscribe link doesn’t work

their messages are technically classed as spam, and therefore, illegal.

So beware Brantano’s mailing list. Once you’re on there, you can’t get off!