Tag Archives: spam

Mailing lists that eventually become spam

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SpamBot 3000 is ready to... serve

SpamBot 3000 is ready to… serve

Occasionally I will opt into a mailing list – but very very rarely will I do so with a real e-mail address. 1  One of the domains I own allows me to specify a “catch all” e-mail address where mis-addressed e-mails will be sent.  The most useful part of this is that I can give out an e-mail address of any sort I want @mydomain.com and the e-mail will be redirected to the account I actually check.  Later if I discover that it wasn’t such a good idea to have given out an e-mail address like that, then I can always forward all e-mail to that address to trash.

For the most part as long as you’re not giving your e-mail address to really sketchy websites or posting them in plaintext somewhere, I’ve found many newsletters/e-mail marketers are pretty ethical.  What’s interesting are those companies that have passed on my (fake) e-mail addresses.  What I’ve found is that they tried to market to me at that address for a few years – and then apparently gave up – at about the same time that I began receiving spam to that address.

Which brings me to a minor rant.  The company I work for2 posted all of the employees’ e-mail addresses online in plaintext.  What a colossally bad idea.  Although I’ve asked the IT guys to at some level of obfuscation3 to our addresses, the requests have gone unheard.  My work e-mail, which is managed by Gmail, does a pretty good job at catching spam – but this seems an unnecessary step.  Even with these protections, I’m still getting phishing e-mails, Nigerian scams, “medications” over the internet, offers to purchase plaques commemorating awards, and all kinds of nonsense.

Uh, yeah, I don’t know where I was going with this one.  :)

  1. Photo courtesy of Tinkerbots [↩]
  2. During my day job for a company you’ve never heard of doing something far less interesting than making awesome robots that make awesome things [↩]
  3. Which would be easy since the company website is on WordPress and there must be a dozen plugins that do exactly this [↩]

The Downside of Blogging

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I have another website/blog that I’ve really basically neglected the hell out of.  Due to some new developments related to that other blog, I put up three posts in the last month.  Which is cool and all except…

Now I’m getting pelted with spam through that blog and to the address associated with that website.  I suppose as the spam kings realize a blog is even slightly active, they decide to start spamming the authors.

Surprising spam comment

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There was this spam comment to a recent post referencing Doctor Who’s sixth season:

..As with the series of Doctor Who last year the final two episodes before the finale have been much more small scale and in some ways a little different. Last week we had a largely Doctor-less story Love and Monsters and this week we got Fear Her a which is set largely in one single.

The wildest thing about this comment is that it isn’t entirely off base.  The comment relates to the third season of Doctor Who with Martha Jones and the two episodes “Love and Monsters” and “Fear Her.” 1  Someone supposedly named “E. Keith Owens” using the e-mail address “timmy_b_dickerson_dzn57@hotmail.com” who posted that spam comment apparently stole it from this website.

I have to wonder – is this a crazy new form of spam?  Did they just type in a few keywords and then get two blogs – mine and that other one – then try to copy/paste our content as comments into each other, and try to get a link back to their crappy foreign exchange website? 2

What incredible nonsense.  As with stupid scareware, why don’t smart people just spend their time creating things that offer value in exchange for money?

  1. Incidentally, two of my least favorite episodes. [↩]
  2. I deleted your link.  So there.  :P  [↩]