Funk Babblings

Lately I've been really amazed at how little spam makes it to my inbox. (Knock on wood...) I use a Bayesian filter, bogofilter, plus some additional filtering to get rid of virus attachments and a particular spammer that's good at getting around Bayesian filters (though I think my filter is finally getting trained well enough on those).

I have gotten some fax spam recently though. No, the laws against that haven't eradicated it. At least there was an 800 number to get off the list; it felt good that it might be costing them a bit of money for me to make that call, even if calling them only verifies that I received their spam so they send more.

Anyway, today I got a new one in email. Well, sort of new. We've all seen the "419 scam" in which some Nigerian supposedly needs help to discreetly transfer a lot of money. This one was similar, but instead of Nigeria it purports to come from a U.S. Army officer in Iraq, claiming to be trying to help an Iraqi businessman move millions of dollars out of Iraq. If I had more time on my hands I might actually mess with this one like some people do.

Do people actually fall for this stuff?

Yesterday I realized just how much my awareness (paranoia?) of scams has invaded my psyche. I had a dream that there was someone at the front door (which has a small head-level window), apparently desperate to get inside. Not wearing my glasses, I couldn't tell whether I knew the person or not. I was torn between opening the door to help or not, because I had no idea whether the person was really in trouble or was just pretending so that I would open the door, then would take advantage of me somehow after I opened the door. I think the part about not wearing my glasses was an important factor too, since my impaired vision would make me more vulnerable after opening the door. But if it were a real emergency, not opening the door would of course be really bad.

Luckily it was just a dream, though it was disturbing enough that I was unable to get back to sleep.