NP: John Cage, 4'33"

If there's any upside to be had from tools that quarantine rather than eliminate spam, it's that you can really easily see patterns in the composition of the messages. First it was, and continues to be, the onslaught of messages with a specific (fictional) person's name, which is a tactic I've seen discussed on MetaFilter. For a while I was getting the same name in the From: and Subject: headers, with some modifier in the subject like "Happy Christmas (name)."

Now I'm getting a whole slew -- that's a technical term -- of messages that all have current event headlines attached to them. Much like the comment spam that exists in name only on the right rail of the main notabbott page sometimes, while this might fool you when you see an isolated case, twelve messages from different people about Suzanne Somers' house burning down is a big more of a red flag.