Mortgage Spam
My wife and I are looking into moving to a bigger house that is closer to our jobs. We started thinking about it early last week, did some poking around over the weekend, and decided Sunday to make the leap. We called our realtor Sunday, and she was back in touch with us Monday. We got the pre-approval mostly done, and the market analysis done on our house. Things aren’t as great as we were hoping for, but we still should be able to afford a bigger house with a little more land. We’re going in next Wednesday to do some searches through our realtor’s database of houses to see if we find anything that fits the bill.
Now to the point… The spammers seem to know that we’re in the market for a new house. I normally get 5-8 mortgage related spams every day. Not a big deal. tcpserver, qmail, SpamAssassin, and procmail do a great job of filtering out most of the crap. Well, in the past two days, I’ve received about 20 mortgage offers in my spam box each day. It’s very odd timing. The emails promise so much more than what we can really afford. I’m not sure how they come up with their numbers for the spammy mortgages, but it can’t be all that scientific. Regardless, I rarely open up any of the emails, and the ones with tempting headines (e.g.: could be legit mail caught as spam) are opened just long enough to determine if they are spam or not. I’m using pine as my mail reader, so it doesn’t fetch any images from the spammers service. This all means that their nasty little web bugs don’t track my behavior without me knowing about it. Great, huh?
Music I’m listening to while posting this: Guns ‘N’ Roses.
