On the drive to the office today, I ran into a bit of a traffic jam on the interstate. A trailer carrying a bunch of Porta-Potties had run into some kind of problem, see, and the Porta-Potties had fallen off the trailer and ended up in the center lane of Interstate 275, and…

…well, I wish I’d had my digital camera handy. You would not believe the mess. There’s something you don’t see every day, thank God.

Suppose you were a spammer, and suppose you were a lying, corrupt criminal. But I repeat myself…

Spammers have a hard life. Fewer and fewer ISPs are allowing them to barrage millions of people with unwanted crap, and it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep the crap flowing. Most of the big spammers have already moved to servers in places like China, Brazil, and Russia, and even those ISPs are beginning to shut them down. What to do?

Well, one group of industrious spammers has a solution:

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From: “Evelyn Church” <s18g20hu4@aol.com>
To: postmaster@xeromag.com
Subject: Stop Unwanted E-Mails Now! qrgfpfi s nt s
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 03 07:00:14 GMT
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Stop Unwanted E-Mails Now! qrgfpfi s nt s

Spam Exterminator
Best Anti-Spam Software
around…
________________________________________________________________
Description:

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Features:

Automatically
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Spam Remedyautomatically checks
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has more precision than other filter-based and keyword-based anti-spam
technologies.

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It examines the entire message – source, headers and mail content to confirm
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Spam Remedy supports POP3, Hotmail/MSN, IMAP4 and MAPI email accounts,
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never blocked or directly treat their mail messages as spam.
Spam Remedy places all intercepted spam messages to its interval mail database
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Download Spam Exterminator NOW!!!

– R.emove me! –

bggbjollahtarpvuuk zezg mpiehuvtvyd zkgebiv pr zi
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zwe

sifaivvidorrtdaqpnpbyxurc juolpnsvxvxz wgkf nu

The headers and links are preserved intact.

What’s this, you say, a spam-blocker being advertised by spam? Vive l’avant garde!

But no, the software (which these spammers are charging $30 for) is not actually a spam-blocker at all. It’s a Trojan horse; when you buy it and install it, it installs a mail server on your computer! The spammers who sold it to you can then–get this–use your computer to send out more spam, without your knowledge or consent.

Many viruses do the same thing, of course. The Minmail and Gibe viruses were written and distributed by spammers, for the purpose of testing the idea of a distributed, viral spam-transmission network. But these guys take the cake–not only do they want to infect your computer with a mail server that they can remotely exploit to send spam, they want to charge you money to do it.