Simply Jonathan

Gmail and spam

Gmail gets a lot of credit from most people for its great spam protection. I have a Gmail account, but I don’t use it. I only log in every X months, because I feel I have to. Often, some spam messages get through. Now, I know spam filters can’t be 100% correct, but when I logged in yesterday, and found a spam message from an Amazon scam1, it wondered me why they didn’t catch it. Aside from being from a lycos.co.uk address, which isn’t really a safe bet for spam, it used a basic scam trick that Thunderbird started catching some years ago: it linked to some website, but making it look like it was linking to another. So, it seemed like it linked to an Amazon login page, but in reality it linked to some fraud site. Why doesn’t Gmail catch such stuff, when it’s so obvious?

  1. I knew it was a scam, since Amazon don’t know my gmail address. ↩

This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.

Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.