What we can do with the spam filter these days?
Every few minutes and, sometimes, seconds my inbox gets another of those annoying spam messages telling me how wonderful cialis is (or how many times Egor Maraev has had sex with the Boston Philharmonic). Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on cheap Viagra. Now these clever guys are into pictures and all kinds of other tricks to get through the mail servers. Images are almost impossible to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. After all, there was that time a year or so back when I had a bad patch and found out how good Viagra is. But to have something every few minutes is just egregiously bad. Why this post? Well, I’ve just had a déjà vu moment all over again. When I was just starting out in IT back in the 70s, one of the standard tools was ASCII - a code for characters, numbers, symbols, etc. And what did we clever people do when we got bored? We made pictures out of all those characters. And guess what’s just popped into my inbox. Yeah, you got it. It’s a headline, “Viagra pill for only $1.10″ with the message built out of ASCII. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking real Viagra. Those smart guys have found a new way to beat the filters.