Spam

I have been posting stuff on the Blotreport for over eight years now, and I receive an enormous amount of spam, sometimes up to 60 a day, which my wonderful spam filter invariably catches. When I started back in early 2017, a fair proportion of the spam was porn, both gay and straight. That eventually faded away and was replaced, strangely, by several other themes, including a spate of “buy a house in Bali” spam. That was fairly short-lived, and was replaced even more bizarrely by “get a diploma in Moscow, which faded fairly recently, although the occasional one still crops up. Sprinkled among all of these was the occasional “Your article was very interesting, but I have a question” type, a proportion of which were in variably mangled English. There are also offers of viagra, steroids or assorted painkillers, and also the occasional one from Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, often pretending to be something else and not always in English. Almost all the recent spam is in Russian offering the ability to place bets (on what, I haven’t bothered to find out). The spam folder holds all these items until I hit the ‘empty spam folder’ button. However, I tend to look through the first few in the latest crop to see what language they are in, where spam is from and what they are trying to flog.