Has anyone else suddenly been getting a huge quantity of SPAM recently?

Unlike the last couple of weeks my server's email SPAM filter has been catching nearly all SPAM arriving at my classicamiga email address. And the odd few it did catch had mostly been caught by the filter built into Outlook 2007.

However in the last couple of weeks loads of SPAM has been getting through both filters into my inbox. Telling Outlook it is SPAM works though as it has then been catching further messages from the same sources. But it seems very odd to suddenly be increasing so much.

And these SPAMs are not like the old porn or nonsense ones everyone gets. They are holiday, finance, buying gold, loans, mortgage offersm credit card offers etc... all directly aimed at the recession and those in trouble. So maybe rather than them being traditional SPAM from hijacked servers in Russia these could be real vulture companies praying on us.

Have you been getting any of these SPAM emails?
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nop
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Me neither.
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I hate it when those tins come through the letterbox. It'd be much easier if they sent me the fritters.
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I had a couple that claim to be FedEx recently.

I'm not sure whether I get more or less spam than I used to, as gmail's spam filter tends to do a very good job and as I don't use its webmail service any more I rarely see the spam folder.

I don't seem to have any spam at all on my stevecoates.net address.

---------- Post added at 08:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 PM ----------

Though I just logged into the address which captures all email which doesn't go to the 'steve' box, and found 24105 emails from Cron Daemon entitled Cron <scoates@ivan> cd '/home/scoates/public_html/moodle/admin/' ; php -q 'cron.php' > /dev/null ;

Must be something to do with the installation of Moodle which I deleted. I thought deleting the database as well as the directory would have prevented anything Moodle related from happening. Any ideas?

Going back to the spam, I have had various other bits of spam get through the filter over the last year or so. For example http://stevecoates.net/stuff/blonde.png.
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Man, that pic was a let down
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Definitely!
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I don't get any at my ISP's email address or my googlemail one. I have seen an increase at work though. Our work spam filters always trap the profane ones, but recently it has been letting through "Get your diploma - you deserve it!" type nonsense. I wish somebody would tell these people I already have a degree - I don't need no stinking diploma!
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I still am puzzled by what the SPAM senders actually expect to achieve with their emails. Collecting valid email addresses to create mailing lists is the obvious reason, but is that the only reason they are doing it? And what is the point in emails with random text content and no urls? Are they just seeing if the emails bounce back or not, and if not tick it off as a valid address? If that were true then any addresses sent to any made up @classicamiga.com address would appear valid because I have a catch all email address setup which catches all emails sent to none existent email addresses for this domain. So it would be a pointless way of collecting lists and verifying addresses.

Beats me.
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I used to use a great little program called MailWasher (on XP). It would go and see what was sitting on the mail server at the ISP, then you could select the spam emails and 'bounce' them back to the sender from the ISP's mail server. Then you would just download non-spam from the mail server to your client. In effect that sends a message saying that your email address isn't valid. Didn't reduce my spam one bit, but it made me feel better!
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