What’s with the spam filter these days?
My mailbox is daily worried by thousands of spam messages. Gone are the days when I could just tweak the filter to include the latest permutation on Viagra. Now these clever spammers are into jpgs and all kinds of other tricks to get through the mail servers. Images are hard to filter out. It’s not that I mind being reminded every now and then what the wonderful little blue pill can do. Why this post? In the end every day I have a strong feeling of dejavu. 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. 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. So it made me sit up and take notice - just like taking Viagra really. Those clever spammers have found a new way to beat the filters.