I only get one spam in my gmail - but 30x a day. WTF?

January 15, 2009 3:27 PM

I only get one piece of spam in my gmail inbox. but I get it 30x a day. WTF?

I loves me some Gmail. But I've laways wondered why although spam is almost nonexistent in my account, I do get the same "A Great Canadian pharmacy is here at your fingertips!" in my spam folder several dozen times a day. I don't seem to get any other spam, so why this one gets me is a mystery.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

posted by bartleby to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Nope,but what research have you done? Are the headers the same? Have you reported it?
posted by Science! at 3:41 PM on January 15

Are they slightly different? The spammer may be hoping that some permutation of the subject/body gets through the spam filter into your inbox.
posted by stavrogin at 3:50 PM on January 15

It's probably all part of some scheme on the spammer's server or botnet. It probably figures that one email won't get noticed in a sea of spam, so if it sends repeated messages, it will be found. Since bandwidth is cheap or practically free via five finger discount if it's a botnet, it may do this indiscriminately to any account that doesn't bounce.

I'm curious, too. Are there multiple copies sent at the same time, or is it spaced out over the day? Maybe post some headers/details. Click the triangle next to "reply" when you have the message open and pick "Show Original" to get some more details. If you could copy and paste as much of it as you like to this thread, that might help someone figure it out. You'll probably want to keep your address out as well as other details at your discretion.

How long have you had your Gmail account? Do you avoid using the address outside of your gmail account? One type of spam is pretty incredible if it's an account that's been around a while.
posted by mccarty.tim at 3:54 PM on January 15

Iits just a botnet spammer spamming as many people as possible and that includes duplicates. Maybe one bot is sending it you as well as another. Maybe a spammer is misconfigured or is using spam lists with duplicates. They dont care. Theyre spammers.

How they found you is anyone's guess. Some of them have lists theyve compiled from a variety of sources. Some try lots of permutations of random words, numbers, etc with @gmail.com at the end.

Gmail doesnt publish its criteria on how they rate spam, so no one knows how they rate this stuff. I imagine its a lot like spamassassin or baraccuda. They rate spam based on blacklists and content. Stuff that reaches a high threshold is never seen by you and the lower ranked stuff is put in your spam folder. Its not really rocket science.
posted by damn dirty ape at 4:13 PM on January 15

Also, if you want to help, then submit the spam to spamcop.
posted by damn dirty ape at 4:14 PM on January 15

Double check to make sure that none of the email addresses in the header are in your address book.
posted by lockle at 5:42 PM on January 15

Keep in mind that you can automatically route emails with characteristics that you specify to be deleted before they even hit your inbox in Gmail by creating a filter. Just set the characteristic that you want to filter by and hit delete before inbox.
posted by theantikitty at 9:04 PM on January 15