Unexpected visitors to our site

Overnight, I received an email from someone how came to our site for a most unusual reason ...

"I wonder if you can help me. I have recently started receiving dozens of bizarre emails such as the one below. When I Googled some of the sentences, such as, •ÜTo put the top hat on it, he quickly assembled a committee .... •[9d] I keep coming up with your blog."

My correspondent went on to ask for my help in getting these emails that she was receiving stopped - erroneously considering that we have some control over them. But that assumption is common enough, so let me share my explanation of what's going on here:

People who send spam don't want it to get stopped by your automated email filters, so they make each of their messages different and unrecognisable by cutting in pieces of text taken at random from other web site with which they have no association at all. So the spam reaches you because it's unique - it has text on it that's been stolen (as it's my copyright and used without my approval) from my site.

I would love to be able to stop these people using my text, but that's pretty impractical ... the best I can do is to answer occasional emails that I get like this and help you understand what is happening. Once your email address is on the list of such people, I fear you'll need to get rid of it with improved filters (ask your ISP if you need help) as requests to delete your name will be pretty ineffective.
(written 2007-03-22)

Associated topics are indexed under

G909 - Well House Consultants - Spam, Spamming and Spammers
  [3506] Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches - (2011-11-03)
  [3352] World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. - (2011-07-09)
  [3316] Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service - (2011-06-04)
  [3190] What do the following web sites have in common? - (2011-03-03)
  [3166] Well house is strong - confirmed? - (2011-02-11)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [2884] Hotlinked images onto adult material sites - (2010-07-23)
  [2697] Email metrics and filtering - (2010-03-28)
  [2398] Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson - (2009-09-06)
  [2276] Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc - (2009-07-10)
  [2179] Offers that I can refuse - (2009-05-12)
  [2177] Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up - (2009-05-12)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
  [1817] Marc Schneider is still having email trouble - (2008-09-30)
  [1763] Co-operating to save, yet we dont - (2008-08-21)
  [1532] Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums - (2008-02-05)
  [1523] Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? - (2008-01-29)
  [1037] Impact Engineering and Backscatter - (2007-01-16)
  [872] Email metrics - (2006-09-20)
  [495] More spam - a success story - (2005-11-13)
  [417] Telephone Preference Service - we're registered - (2005-08-17)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [338] OO techniques are hard to teach - (2005-06-06)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)

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Origin of Jack and Jill and little Jack Horner
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PHP adding arrays / summing arrays
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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