Tag: viagra

Bayes, and the Mythical Viagra Spam

OK. I’ve been running a test where I’ve been attempting to gather Viagra spam into a Gmail mailbox, viagraspamtest@gmail.com

I started the test in mid-May, posting the email address to questionable and shady mailing lists, as well as linking the address in plain text on my blog.

And 6 weeks in, how is it going? Well…it’s not. There’s not even a hint of Viagra spam. Nothing in the spam folder, nothing in the Inbox. Just all legitimate mailings from newsletters.

Possibly, it takes time to get onto shady mailing lists. I imagine lists of emails get hacked and resold to spammers, but that it takes a while for a given email list to work its way down to the spammers.

Also possible — there’s no more Viagra spam. As in, spam mentioning Viagra by name. They are either advertising whole pharmacies, a class of drugs (blood pressure, E.D.), or the ad is in an image that gets embedded into the email.

Maybe I should retry this project with the word “pharmacy”. Viagra spam is *sooo* 2002, anyways.

Viagra spam filtering

My buddy Kevin saw my previous post on training Gmail to deliver only Viagra spam, as well as the part about how Pfizer must handle their spam filtering.

Being an enterprising person, he emailed Pfizer. Here’s their reply:

From: pfizer@pfizer.com
Date: April 15, 2008 12:53:23 PM EDT
To: EMAIL

Subject: RE:Email Validation

This email is sent by the Pfizer server. In order for us to

respond to your inquiry, we need to verify your email address.

Please complete this process by clicking on the link below.

Once you have completed this process, you will receive

a confirmation email

http://www.pfizer.com/verification.do?id=1-CONFIRMATIONCODE

Thank you for contacting Pfizer.

[THREAD ID:1-CONFIRMATIONCODE]

A bit of a pain, but I can understand why. Good job.