HCoder.org

Today I have had a gigantic e-mail spam attack. And by “gigantic” I mean something like one every couple of seconds. It seems to have stopped by now, though (maybe until tomorrow, sigh). However, there is some small tip that I used in the meantime, and I have found it helps me filtering spam so I thought I’d share with you. It’s very simple: ordering by subject instead of by date. Of course, you have to filter your view to only unread messages, but it works surprisingly well.

This is very easy to do in mutt, my mail reader of choice (for personal e-mail; I have found that, at least for work e-mail, Opera’s M2 works quite well too). You just have to limit to unread messages (pressing lowercase “L” and then using “~N” as filter), and then sort by subject (:set sort=subject). I have even created too “macros” in mutt to switch back and forth between “spam filtering mode” and “normal mode” :

 macro     index     \Cs     ":set sort=subject<return>l~N<return>"
 macro     index     \Cq     ":set sort=threads<return>lall<return>"

Let’s hope it doesn’t begin again tomorrow :-S

The last days I have noticed that most of the spam I receive has some made up news as subject. I imagine it is to make people click on the messages.

The point is that one of those messages was titled “Knol, the Wikipedia killer”, or something along those lines. I didn’t click on the message, and actually I just thought that “Knol” was a made up word… but then I thought “hm, maybe this exists after all”, so I went to the Wikipedia page… and there you go, I just found out about Knol and learned something about Music in Capoeira because of some spam message.

Informative spam. Go figure. Or maybe it means I should read more tech news?