Has anyone else out there been getting hammered with viral emails lately? I hardly ever used to get them, and then with the advent of the MyDoom virus, I got loads and loads of emails pretending to be mail-transaction-failed and message-sent-as-binary-attachment fake-outs. That lasted from late January to the end of February. Then some came in a flurry from late March to early April, then a few every week or so.

But now they’re coming hot and heavy again, three or four a day. Many come with the false disclaimer of “+++ Attachment: No Virus found,” as if they’d been checked already. I don’t know, maybe that’s fooling some people. But my guess is that these fakes are becoming the new Nigeria emails, in that everyone has gotten so many that only newbies could be caught by them.

Speaking of Nigeria, I rarely get any now–in my main account. But I’ve been getting interesting results from my spam experimentation for my Computer class next semester. I knew, for example, that posting your email address on a web page would get you picked up by the spammers–but not to the degree that I’m seeing. I put up a phony email address (a throwaway account) on my blog site’s main page–the address being invisible to the eye, but existing as text as part of the page. Sure enough, a few days later, I start getting spam–and it has been quickly accelerating. It’s been two weeks now, and the account has gathered 33 spams. What’s interesting is that fully 1/3 are not standard spams, but Nigeria “419” scam letters, fake lottery emails, and a virus posing as a love letter (complete with a photo).

Just as interesting is the ratio–fully 25% of all the emails to the account are Nigerian scams (“To show my preparedness and appreciation to conduct this business with you,I shall give you 20% of the total funds and 5% commission on any profit that we might realise in the process of investing the funds”). I did not expect the ratio to be so high, and in fact had thought the Nigerian thing had more or less died because of how much a joke it has become. But it seems that they have simply moved on to other pastures. Still, it is amusing to get emails offering me millions of dollars because they “got your contact from an email directory” just a few weeks after I made up the email address and hid it on my web site. Or that I was entered into a lottery “held on the 23th March 2004” with my “email address attached to the ticket number” when I created the email address in April. Now that’s an amazing lottery!

What has been most surprising, however, is the complete lack of spam from the opt-out sites. I entered a fake address into no fewer than 26 opt-out directories for major spam sites–and not a single email has come back. I’m almost disappointed, but if this comes through, I might even take the dive and enter my real email address into them, and see if they actually do stop sending me spam. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the rear?