Not all my spam is automatically filtered. On one account I've started resorting to automatic filtering, because it's become untenable - however a different one I still manually filter. As a result something caught my eye. I post on usenet periodically about different things on different topics in different conversations (all sorts). That means there are also some names I naturally recognise from others, and I think "ah that's not spam".

After all, if you get an email with the subject "My New Year's resolutions", and on the surface it's from someone you know, you don't mentally mark it as spam. Anyway, what struck me was in the past 48 hours I've recieved about 8 spam emails (with the same content) from email addresses I know and recognise. Given email addresses can't be spoofed so trivially (insanely so), this made me wonder - how come this spam *only* comes from people I know and have been in conversations with on usenet?

And then I realised - have spammers  finally have started resorting to building automatically the social network of people who have chatted on usenet and then send spams whilst spoofing being inside that network? If so that's really quite nasty/inventive. There's no way of knowing if that's the case, but it could start causing real problems for people using whitelisting.