I was just checking through my spam folder, and it seems the spammers have learned a new trick. Google image search for the letters in a word you want to write, then write image references straight to Google’s cached copy of each image you find:

Thank goodness the links still have to point to disreputable sites that we can blacklist (through URIBLs) or get shut down, even if the images are now all reputable. But as soon as somebody builds a peer-to-peer e-commerce system, I predict the spammers will go wild.

And another spam, sent by way of my debian.org account, where quite a bit of my spam comes from:

Dear user of debian.org, Mail system administrator of debian.org would like to inform you

Your e-mail account has been used to send a large amount of spam messages during this week.
Most likely your computer was infected by a recent virus and now runs a hidden proxy server.

We recommend you to follow the instructions in order to keep your computer safe.

Have a nice day,
debian.org user support team.

Attached to the message was, of course, message.zip, which contained message.pif. I can’t run that as I don’t have a Windows install, but I guess a virus was attached to this supposed virus warning. Most incredible was that the sender forged headers to look like they used Outlook. What kind of mail system administrator uses Outlook?

If only all these incredibly creative spammers and virus writers would do something useful.