inbox

Spam Getting More Sophisticated

July 17, 2009 BY Mark Evans

Say what you want about spammers but they definitely creative.

Take, for example, what they’re doing with comments on blogs. At first blush, the comments look legit. But if you look at the e-mail and Web site address, you realize it’s a spammer looking to get a link on your blog.

Here’s a comment left by a spammer, who was hoping to get some attention for his hottub spa site, about a blog post on how I use Twitter:

I already try to use twitter but only active when I’m online via my laptop. But until now I’m still do not get any clue what makes twitter can be loved by so much people mean while I do not see any interesting for using twitter.

Maybe others can give an idea what this is all about since I only try to follow others(not people that I know) and usually around half of them will follow me back.

It looks like a comment and smells like a comment but, baby, it’s spam.

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  • http://www.twitter.com/steve_dodd steve Dodd

    Yes Mark, it's becoming a huge issue not just for bloggers but also Twitter users. And as this becomes more mainstream, we'll see more and more of it with very nasty payloads burried in those links as well. This is the real reason for focusing on the elimination of spam as has been experienced with email for years. Annoying, yes! Dangerous, even more so!

  • Dropper Inner

    it almost makes the web unusable when every third comment is real. I've tried to join yahoo groups, but they're all spam, email is all spam and social networking sites (I'm looking at you facebook) are turning into all spam also. I find that it is becoming frustrating using the web for anything but casual reading or videogames; it's so hard to find people to converse with.

  • http://MikeMandelHypnosis.com Chris

    Mark – the guy's grammar was not very good, and he didn't *really* try to add value to the conversation, so fair enough to call it spam. That said, I think it's legitimate for people to comment on blogs and get a link back to their site (if the blog is setup to allow this), provided that they are respectful and adding value.

    Twitter spam is another whole area … but probably a lot less of a problem. You see a TON of tweets that are blatant promotions to affiliate links, etc. The good news is that nobody is there to read those tweets, so it's like the tree falling in the forest with nobody to hear it or see it. Nobody cares. If I accidentally followed someone on Twitter and realize later that they spam via tweets, I'd just unfollow them.