Mail merge FAIL

You know how it is when you need a vacation. You’re tired and cranky. You daydream. You can’t focus. You confuse things. I think that is what happened with a recent batch of spam reported on by the Commtouch Labs.

A few samples looked something like this:

The image is missing and the text is an HTML mess. I opened the mail with a text editor to figure out what went wrong…and as seen below in the body of the message, it appears that there was a mistake replacing the %VARIABLE, where VARIABLE should have been replaced by a corresponding value in the spammer’s spreadsheet (e.g. a URL or a name). Looks like their mail merge failed.

I guess even spammers need a break every now and then…it must be hard work trying to clog inboxes with unsolicited mail!