Is it just me or are the spammers getting stupider? I get a lot of spam myself because I keep my e-mail address visible without obfuscating tricks. As a business owner, I do want people to be able to contact me easily. Making it hard for them isn't good business.

Sometimes when I get a spam e-mail, I have to look at it carefully to determine that it's really spam. Are the hyperlinks pointing to a strange domain? Is this really coming from the organization that claims to be sending it? Are they asking for information that they shouldn't be asking for over e-mail? Are there attachments that look dangerous?

Today, I received a spam e-mail that purported to be from Facebook claiming that all users need to update their account agreements. A few things signalled alarms on this e-mail. First, I don't think that Facebook would send me an e-mail address with a sex shop e-mail address in the "Reply-To" field. Second, the e-mail wasn't asking me to visit a web site. Instead, the instructions were:

Please unzip the attached file and run "agreement.exe" by double-clicking it.

My virus checker suppressed the attachment so I never even saw it.

Are spammers getting lazy or are they explicitly trying to target people who aren't savvy to these tricks?