Myles Braithwaite

This is some spam I received today.

To: me@mylesbraithwaite.com
Subject: Private Invitation
From: Mr Yasir Ali
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:51:01 +0100

Dear: President/C.E.O.

Good Day.

It is my pleasure to request for your honest assistance. This request may seem strange but I will crave your indulgence and pray that you view it seriously.

My name is Mr Yasir Ali from Pakistan. purchasing agent to leader of Jundollah militant group in Pakistan.

Due to the Pakistan Army's offensive in South Waziristan, I was mandated by a senior rebel leader to purchase arms and ammunition from a private dealer in Russia worth Ten Million American Dollars Only. The said amount was moved through Iran boarder on the 17Th of September 2009 to Russia.

It was quite unfortunate that upon my arrival, I immediately change my mind against purchasing of arms in the name of war of Islam. I have succeeded on diverting the fund into a security storage company.

I pray to Allah to forgive me for all the innocent people killed during my service to the rebel force. I have promise my self and Allah never to involve in any form of crime to humanity through out my life time.

In view of the above, I will never like to go back to Pakistan again because of my life and wish to invest this funds under your umbrella and supervision.

I will also seek your assistant to help me secure traveling documents for my wife and two children.

In summary.

I needed your assistant and protection to the funds. Base on the above detail information, I will highly appreciate if my request is given utmost priority and consideration.

Greetings,

Mr Yasir Ali Secure ID: -@live.com

Today I received the following email:

From: Petr ******* - File Extensions Resource <****.*******@file-extensions.xxx>
Date: July 15, 2009 3:38:49 PM GMT-04:00
To: me@mylesbraithwaite.com
Subject: Site suggestion - File extension library

Hello,
can you please add a link to our website File-Extensions.xxx at your page http://mylesbraithwaite.com as a useful computer file extensions resource?

Our site URL: http://xxx.xxxx-xxxxxxxxx.xxx/
Large file extension list and file types resource site.

Detailed site description: A huge file extension list including easy-to-understand descriptions and associated applications. Quickly search by extension, view common and most popular file extensions, and click to extension categories including audio and music files, multimedia, graphic and image file types and others.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Thanks a lot

Petr
File-Extensions.xxx

Screen Shot

I took a look at the email headers and found this X-Mailer: LinkAssistant (http://www.link-assistant.xxx). A quick web lookup brought up an application called LinkAssistant and one of the features is:

Quickly address all partners in personalized emails.
Professional SEOs know how to approach owners of high-PR websites, ask them for a link and have huge chances to get it. You're even smarter with LinkAssistant. You will quickly find hundreds of relevant high-quality websites, instantly send out piles of personal link requests and convince site owners to link to you.

I am not a fan of SEO but this is just crossing a line. A lot of people more intelligent than me have weigh in one this topic but I am going to reiterate one idea: If you write good content Google will index your site and give you a high page ranking.

90% of SEO is simple rules for building clean HTML. The other 10% is that SEOs are really just life coaches who need to transform their clients into something awesome that people actually care about. What you really need to optimize for is being awesome. And that's a bit harder than pulling some SEO out of your magic bag of tricks.

If you have ever deployed a website for a company one of the features you are asked to implement is Email to a Friend, a nice little feature that allows the website visitor to send a link with a little description of the page and a message to another person. Most of us have probably at some point in our lives have used this simple easy to use feature.

The company I am working at, I maintain three Drupal websites all with the Forward module, which is a great little module. Today a spammer decide they could use this feature to their advantage, if they sent out the spam messages using this feature they could hit a large number of people. Within a thirty minute window they launched their attack send roughly 30,000 email messages across the three websites.

You maybe wondering I found out what they were doing. While I am a somewhat good system administrator so I receive all the system base email that are sent though the system (root, apache2, etc.), because the the module sends out it's emails using the apache2 user I received all the bounce back emails. Which at this point have my inbox at around 10,000 unread email messages and they are still coming down! I have had to put my email account on an official hiatus until this queue is empty.

So how can we fix this problem in the future? While one way is before sending out any of these email they could go though some type of spam filter. Or why do we need this service in the first place, how difficult is it to copy and paste?

I really hate when I received an email that tells me that the sender has requested to be notified when I (the receipt) open the Email.

This is a rather controversial topic, since it touches privacy issues. So the best is to ask the recipient that she sends you an acknowledge :-).

Sendmail’s Documentation on How to get notified when an e-mail has been read/delivered?

My email will be down from Friday, October 20, 2006 at 4:00 PM to Monday, October 23, 2006 at 9:00 AM.