Gmail Spam Sightings

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I set up a Gmail account and posted the address in my blog on June 30. That email address is posted nowhere else. Yesterday I received an unsolicited message of unknown purpose (I hesitate to call it spam), and today a 419 scam spam. So, it took 5 or 6 days, depending on which one we count, for the first spam to arrive. Chris got his first Gmail spam faster, but given that this past weekend was the Independence Day holiday weekend in the USA, I feel somewhat justified in subtracting three days from my total, so I may have a tenuous claim to have equaled Chris ;-)

The message of unknown purpose is a tough call. I have no idea who the sender is, so it is definitely an unsolicited email message. But apart from the fact that it is HTML-encoded, it has none of the hallmarks of a bulk or commercial message. Gmail did not classify it as spam. It was not sent through an open relay, it contains no links, no forged headers, and no overt commercial pitch. At least, the Babelfish translation of it does not seem to contain any overt commercial pitch. It's in Portuguese, which I do not speak or read. It seems to be simply a brief quotation from a book by a fellow named Edilmar Lima. I haven't tried replying to it to see if the return address is valid. I suppose that it could just be a mis-addressed message, but so soon after I established the account, and with an address "rhsatrhs" it's hard to imagine a single character typo that might make it into someone else's likely address. So, I think I'll call it spam.

BTW, just as Chris reported, my 419 spam was accompanied by relevant links, in this case mostly related to Taiwan travel and banking. The message began "I am Mr. Chan Fung, Bank Manager of Land Bank, Kincheng branch, Fukien, Taiwan, R.O.C.". Chan Fung? Wasn't he one of the actors on Hawaii 5-0?