Guest Article
Spam from Hell
by Dennis Gaskill
Just when you thought spammers couldn't sink any lower - they do. I received spam from a "company" regarding the foreign exchange market. I wasn't even going to read it as I already knew it was spam, but when I clicked the mail in my inbox to delete it, it launched my browser, minus the tool bar.
Not having the tool bar meant I couldn't close the browser by clicking the "X" in the upper right hand corner of the program. So OK, I right-clicked on the button on the task bar—you can close a browser that way too, just right-click and select Close.
Guess what? The Close option was grayed out, the web page was coded so that there was no obvious way to close the browser. This was a spammer with no sense of decency at all.
On the web page was a form to fill out to for information. In others words, he'll have it on record that you requested more information so he can legally spam you until you can't eat any more. It's sad to think how many people will fill out that form thinking it's the only way to get out of that mess. I imagine many just turned off their computer by pushing the power button too, and that isn't good for the operating system.
That's why I'm going to tell you how to close that spammers window without sending any information. I don't want you to suffer from this low-life's attempts to shove his crap down your throat. Here's how:
Press and hold the Ctrl, Alt, and Del keys at the same time and then release, this will open the Close Program dialog. Select the spammer's dirty little page from the list of programs running and click the End Task button. If you have another browser window open this will probably close it too, but the spammer's plans will be thwarted, at least as far as you're concerned.
One last thing, it doesn't seem to do any good to set up filters to filter this classless wart's email. After setting up an elaborate set of filters to block that mail, I received another one just like it. Everything was different; the sender, the subject line, even the send to line. There is no message in the body of the email, just embedded code to launch the browser.
May the Elephant Bird of Paradise fly over this spammers head and drop a steaming, stinking ton of . . . you get the idea.
This article was written and copyrighted by Dennis Gaskill of www.i-webmaster.org and is reprinted here with permission. Visit www.i-webmaster.org today for the best web design help, reprintable content, graphics, inspiration, free software and more.
