Today I was checking my blog’s spam folder – and I was surprised by what I saw.

When I first set up this blog, spam comments would be giant list of links. It was completely unnatural and easy to spot.

Then they changed into big collection of random words. Those would avoid pure “block multiple links” filter, but were also trivial to spot.

Then they evolved to constructed paragraphs about the products they are trying to sell. They were completely out of context with the post they commented, so it was trivial to spot them.

More recently, I was getting a lot of “your blog i very good” spam, where a praising comment would come together with the spammers webpage as the webpage of the comment’s poster. Now a few of them actually did look like regular comments (at least until I got used to their general structure), but it was easy to see that they were completely out of context (and always had that marketing link in them).

Today, I saw some really “interesting” spam – the spam was tailored to the blog posts that I wrote! In one where I wrote about my house hunting, the spambot said “this city is easy to live with so many hotels”. In another one, where I mentioned I was reading sherlock holmes, the spambot commented on the most recent sherlock homes movies. There were 5 total such spams in my spambox.

Of course, a quick glance would spot all of the robotic grammar in the comments, and the context was still not really there. And the random ad link was still there in the “http” section. Still, it is impressive to see the evolution of spam. I wonder if it will eventually come to this.

Also, credit where credit is due: My spamfilter, Akismet, is also getting smarter, and keeping itself one step ahead of the spammers – It has been more than a year since a single spam message fell into my “comments” box.