The Evolution Of Spam
January 7th, 2010 | 
Author: SPAM is an e-mail received that you have not asked for, as in you have not signed up to someone’s list and asked for information from them.
I get quite a lot of spam as I’m sure everyone with their own website does, but the evolution of this spam is very worrying. Just before christmas there was an influx of facebook spam, which I am sure led to mane people’s accounts being hacked.
The spammers are getting more sophisticated and are now sending html messages and not plain text messages. This means that they can show you any url they like while hiding the real url.
I use microsoft outlook for my e-mails and if I hove over any link it shows me the real link, so I can always check if I am unsure. Today though I got a spam e-mail that shocked me. It was from my domain to my normal e-mail at that domain explaining that there had been an upgrade and I had to click the link to confirm the changes. I have posted the content at the bottom of this post with a few details blanked out for security, but I wanted you to see how believable it was. I checked the url straight away and it was a fake one, but others may not check, so I wanted to make you all aware.
The best advise I can give you to avoid this new evolution of spam is that if you are unsure about a link in an e-mail DO NOT click it.
Here is the e-mail I got, remember that the url shown has been changed to protect my security, but that also it was not the real url …
Dear user of the kellyifrah.com mailing service!
We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (admin@kellyifrah.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:
http://kellyifrah.com/xxx/xxx/xxx.php?email=admin@kellyifrah.com&from=kellyifrah.com&fromname=admin
Best regards, kellyifrah.com Technical Support.
Letter_ID#XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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Happy New Year
- Image by micah.e via Flickr
Wishing you the very best of all things for the coming year.
The most important thing is to take action this year.
Pick one of those products you have been collecting, read it or watch it and put it to action. Keep a diary of what you do for a month. Then look back at what you did and what you have achieved. I bet it’ll be more than you did last month 
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Update & Apologies
My gosh, nearly 7 months since my last post. The time has flown by. I have been building sites like a mad lady and increasing my adsense and affiliate sales, which has been great.
I’ve done a lot of testing and tweaking to find what works and what doesn’t, so get ready for 2010 when I am going to share it all with you.
I promise, as my new year’s resolution, to write once a week to this site so that there is always something new for you to read and learn from.
Happy holidays to all and I wish you and your families a healthy new year to come 
