I had already titled the blog when I saw that Robin had written something about spam too. Robin, I have had my share of similar spam, and there is somone who has been reporting it on Planet Debian too. This spam is starting to get increasingly hard to filter. On a different note Peter Zaitchev posted a similar entry on Kernel Planet.
My beef in the last few days has been with Russian spam instead. It has been month since I started receiving this kind of spam, but usually it was a few mail over a week. Lately instead it has been tons of them.
Why does it bother me? Well first of all because it seems GMail doesn’t seem to identify that kind of spam that well. I fed a few hundreds of it in their spam folder and it still hasn’t been detected. At first I thought it was a matter of it being written in a language different than English, but it detects my ISP’s advertisement as spam already (after forcing hundreds of that in the Spam folder).
But it’s not just that, there are tons of spam that pass uncaught, and even more that is actually caught by GMail and never reaches me (I only ever had a couple of false positives up to now as far as I know). What really drives me crazy is the uselessness of this spam!
I can “understand” Nigerian scams as they try to get money out of people who can’t understand that an old lady would never write to someone she has never seen in her life to transfer the whole national treasure of Nigeria. But what the heck do those Russian want from me? I cannot read Russian in the first place! If you want to spam in Russian, do so only to .ru addresses! Otherwise at least translate it in English (which incidentally I’d expect GMail to handle better)!
Really what drives me crazy is that the only achievement of that spam in my case is to give me tons of noise in my Inbox. I woke up today with 12 new messages, all spam, 3 in English, the rest in Russian.
Really annoying!
