Friday 24 September 2010

Gmail Spam Explosion

The normally very successful Gmail spam filter seems to have been overloaded with a new variety of spam in the last week or so. Initially it was spam emails with just the words "hello how are you" and no other information that were getting into our inbox without being filtered. It was unclear what the purpose of these messages was as there was no advertising, no links and no attachments and the sender address was also spoofed.

The latest messages that are defeating the Gmail spam filter are a series with contents as below

Please find attached below a copy of the document you requested.
Please find my CV and cover letter attached.
Greetings from Amazon.com

All have a file attached of the format below which may have some payload attached if run on your PC but on iPhone just shows as text.

27915doc.html

The messages have all been reported to Gmail to improve their filtering but it is unclear what the purpose is when replies cannot be harvested for active email accounts and the email contains no payload.