Spamalicious Q. Mailinglist

[ilanarama]

Although my carefully-protected "real" email address gets nearly no spam at all (do you hear me knocking on wood, here?) my old NCAR address gets an astonishing quantity. Despite it being completely inactive for four years, when I started work there again and reactivated the old ilana@ucar.edu address, it was immediately overwhelmed with on the order of 25 spammails a day.

I've cut down on nearly all of it with vicious filtration; since all my social email goes to my personal address, my filters are brutal and mostly effective. (So far, I've only tossed one "real" email in six months.)

But today I got seven mostly-identical spammails that slipped through the filter. And I have to say, I was mightily amused by the "From" names, which were either randomly generated, or more likely sort-of-randomly generated. Today I got mail from:

Gradation P. Romania
Iran H. Unpolluted
Communism B. Stoker
Exigencies G. Lineup
Quinine L. Hazy
Glinting Q. Formalize
Telecasted C. Albany

Aren't those wonderful names? I'm practically jealous. Maybe I'll change my name.

Yours,
Glinting

Comments

[alembicresearch.livejournal.com]

I like "Quinine L. Hazy" ...

Re: spam
I get so much spam in my yahoo emailbox that it fills
up nearly twice a day (6meg limit on the free account).

My work e-mail address doesn't get to much,
but it is not published anywhere outside, and
we have fairly vigorous anti-spam filters here at work.

The worse thing is, I think a lot of the "spam" I get
is somekind of worm-spam, because it's all "microsoft patch" something.
And the worse thing about it is, they're about 150k in size,
and it doesn't take many of them to stuff yahoo e-mail box.

Yahoo wants me to pay for a bigger mail box, so they aren't
doing much to stop the inundation.

Or at least they are reacting to it very very slowly.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

I like "Iran H. Unpolluted". It's practically political/social commentary.

Charging users so that they can receive more spam has got to be the best moneymaking idea Yahoo's had yet. Much better than the 'pay for your index listing' scam.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Columbia University does this too. To their credit they have pretty good spam filters, but, you know, in this day and age people will mail you the odd 5 MB PDF or Word document or .ppt or .xls - for work-type purposes - and Columbia makes you pay for increases to the standard 20MB. Go over quota and mail gets dropped - not bounced, DROPPED - with no warning whatsoever from the web interface (if you log in to shell, of course, it gives you a handy warning just below the motd.)

"You can use a departmental purchase order to bill it to your grant," the email says cheerfully. Grumble.

Mr. Fate Amenable To Change

[wee-tim.livejournal.com]

for some other interesting names check out this list of Spaceship names from th e books of Ian Banks, keep in mind that these are artificial intelligent ships the size of continents and small planets that have named them selves, and are rather the controling power of known universes.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~and1000/banks/ships.html

ps- his sci-fis and novel all rawk.

Re: Mr. Fate Amenable To Change

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes! I've only read Excession, but thank you for reminding me of these, because I love the ship names.

Too bad our parents aren't this inventive. Well, maybe it's a good thing.

Re: Mr. Steely Glint

[wee-tim.livejournal.com]

you can change your own name, my dear.

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

Communism B. Stoker

The author of Dracula a red, whodathunkit.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

A rose by any other name

[(Anonymous)]

My previous favorite was

Sybele Nork

But today, I received one from

Slave J. Apoplectic

which does tempt one toward identity theft. Mr. or Ms. Apoplectic was advertising footage of that deed for which Gibbon wrote a mighty footnote in latin dealing with the proclivities of the Empress Theodora; and for which Catherine the Great has been rumor-butted for centuries.