New Spam Trick: Pretend to be an Email Newsletter

Posted on January 18, 2007

Spammers are disguising their annoying spam messages as legitimate email newsletters. A report in the Washington Post says spammers have tweaked legitimate e-mail and sent them through normal spam channels. This is enabling the spam to get through both human and software filters.

The sneaky spam messages first began appearing last month. Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-abuse engineering at Symantec Corp. told the Post that he suspects spammers are constantly fine-tuning their techniques to see what works. Bowers says, "It's sort of the early warning sign for us."

There is no end to the tricks spammers will take. This is sure to irritate readers of newsletters and create confusion as some newsletter subscribers may may a the false assumption that the publisher sent the spam. Spam has not been kind to email newsletter publishers and this just more bad news as spam continues to ruin email for legitimate publishers.


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