9 posts tagged “email”

Shame on the following companies today:

Panda Security, for spamming the Medinge Group. While there is always a possibility that forged headers led to our address being subscribed, there was never any confirmation from us, plus I’ve since used all their unsubscribe methods in their spams, and have even written to the company using its feedback form. This is sad for a company that supposedly is looking after home computer security.

Tech2.com: never subscribed, yet the target of spamming for a year at least. We have Tech2.com’s IP addresses manually entered into our server, which means we get a tiny header notification in our trash—signalling that they are still coming. Again, a company that should know better.

   Have other Voxers ever been surprised at who spams, given what their corporate missions are?

I’ve had to turn off email notifications from Vox yesterday and I want to publicly say this is not due to anyone in my neighbourhood.
   As you’ll read at Zen Ken’s Vox blog, a musician called Matt Springfield spammed us yesterday.
   Mr Springfield has a lot of us in his neighbourhood and sent a Vox notification to us six times. While the repetition was accidental, it did highlight for me that Vox has a security problem. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the person in your neighbourhood—if the other person has you in there, they can send these notifications to you.
   If you read the comments at Mr Springfield’s latest post, there are unhappy people, and the first commenter, Susan, who is one of my neighbours, suggests this is not the first time he has engaged in spamming.
   I gave him some advice that he should send to only those people who have requested his messages, not everyone he has in his neighbourhood (and there are a lot).
   I have also written to Vox. There are people I want to hear from (e.g. Twana) but Vox switches off email notifications of each type completely. I think we should be able to hear from people we have in our own neighbourhoods or block individual members such as Mr Springfield.

You know how spammers regularly put a fake name next to your email address that’s somehow compiled from their database?
   It’s been a wonderful filtering tool because somewhere along the line, one spammer decided my name is Newton Singewald. Evidently that spammer had sold on that list with the alias intact, so I now receive emails addressed to Newton. Bingo—the name is in my filters now.
   How very cooperative!
   As Christians know, Newt was one of the first five disciples: Matthew, Mark, Olivia, Newt and John.

One thousand, eight hundred spams today. I hope that record will not be broken for a while.
   Thank you to those spammers in the United States (Comcast, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves—plenty came through you, so it’s ironical you block so many other ISPs and accuse them of spamming), Turkey, Poland, Red China, Hungary, Mexico and Chile for wasting my goddamn time today.
   To the ISPs and hosts with open relays: come on, get with the programme.
   But with our reporting software, we added a heck of a lot of IP addresses to blacklists today without my lifting a finger.

Since November, I have received scam emails from a company called China Net Technology Ltd. A page about the scam can be found in the comments here.
   The MO: a company finds a dot com and sends them a letter, saying that another company plans to register the same name, but for various Chinese territories (with the cn, tw and hk suffixes, among others).
   Your expected reaction: you panic and decide to negotiate with the company, because it claims it is a registry service for domain names.
   Their response: they send you a form for the domain names, at outrageous (thousands of dollars) prices.
   Initially, I was so naïve I started talking to these people. They did highlight a few domains our company planned on getting, so we registered those—but through our regular domain name registration service, paying a normal price.
   When they sent me the form, I said, ‘Forget it.’ I knew how much these names were actually worth and how they were probably phonies. Their response, sensing that the deal was about to slip through their fingers, was to say that the company wanting to register the domains was known for porn.
   By this point I didn’t really care.
   It got more suspicious as these emails kept on coming, either from another company or from the same one, but claiming yet another group was planning to register the same domains. I’ve had three more for one dot com and another for a dot org, same MO.
   Ergo: these are scammers.
   I was lucky. According to the E-consultancy page I cited, some folks even get called up by the scammers. I was fortunate that I was travelling when they first emailed me, so they never figured out where I was.
   So while you should protect your domain names, if you are interested in Chinese ones, do not get suckered in by these folks. Use your regular registry service or a respectable company.

Seen in Facebook today:

Darn, He didn’t get my email. Blame the ISP.

[Cross-posted] There have been a lot of domestic businesses emailing me of late out of fear that, if they sent me more bulk emails, they would violate the new anti-spam legislation that comes into force in New Zealand tomorrow.
   This has been good in the case of NZ Post, to whom I never gave permission to spam me. It has also allowed me to get off another list that I sent a remove request to some time ago that was not honoured.
   But the majority are from businesses that need to communicate with me as a member of the press. Why they need to verify that I wish to continue on their mailing lists seems a waste of time.
   Of course journalists need to continue receiving press releases, and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill, in its final draft form, provides an exception for them.
   The interpretation part of any legislation is always interesting as you an infer some of Parliament’s intent there. ‘Consented to receiving’ means, inter alia:

consent that can reasonably be inferred from—
   (A) the conduct and the business and other relationships of the persons concerned; and
   (B) any other circumstances specified in the regulations;

It goes on to provide other interpretations of consent, e.g. when an email address has been ‘conspicuously published by a person in a business or official capacity; and’ there is nothing to suggest that the person does not want to be spammed; and:

   (C) the message sent to that address is relevant to the business, role, functions, or duties of the person in a business or official capacity; but
(b) does not include the circumstances specified in the regulations from which consent cannot be inferred[.]

   For those businesses (like ours) that have mailing lists that only includes people that have specifically and expressly requested to be on it, then this Act presents no problems. The only ones where we have compiled addresses are press mailings, covered by the definition of consent.
   It shows that by respecting laws over a decade before they are drafted, we are sitting pretty.
   In fact, I am not sure how this law might apply to us, with the only problem being false addresses that are fed in to our request forms. It does mean that we need to keep more records, which is a burden on honest businesses.
   We, and the many emailing us, may actually have a final out, with the following not qualifying as unsolicited commercial email (UCE):

provides notification of factual information about a subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship involving the ongoing purchase or use by the recipient of goods or services offered by the person who authorised the sending of the message, or the recipient’s ongoing subscription, membership, account, loan, or similar relationship;

which largely covers notices that we send out.
   I wanted an anti-spam law here in New Zealand because I was getting unsolicited junk email from the ACT Party over the course of maybe one year. But when one considers the bigger picture, the majority of spam in New Zealand is not from New Zealanders. The majority is from American, Russian and eastern European countries, often routing through Far East servers. And this act does nothing to prevent them.
   In that frustration, I foresee a rush to judgement by regular people now panicked by all these extra-cautious requests from companies. What if they had signed up to a list and forgot about it? Does this Act now arm them, making them into amateur Perry Masons who believe that they have one up on legitimate, honest companies? Honest people will be pursued.
   In such a case, is it fair to shift the onus of proof on to the sender, when the sender might not have kept records prior to the Act coming in to force of the original subscribe request?
   I believe honest companies can discharge the onus of proof by providing evidence of how their emailing lists are compiled. In our case, we send an initial email, outlining that someone had signed up with that address. We ask the recipient to notify us immediately in case of fraud. Since 2006, we send out two emails to confirm the fact (one acknowledgement, one confirmation) with clear removal and feedback links.
   Sorry, Kiwis, tomorrow will not be a spam-free day. We will receive as many spams about penis enlargements, drugs and porn as we did today. The same SOBs will email us about wins in lotteries we never entered, or ask if we can transfer funds for some ousted African dictator. It targets the wrong people, but then, Parliament cannot exactly enact laws that go outside our borders—and that is where spam mostly comes from.

Disclaimer: don’t rely just on me. Seek legal advice.

This is a new one as far as phishing and spamming goes. I see plenty Nigerian scams (at least five a day) and fake bank and Ebay ones. But the Better Business Bureau?
   Business owners, be warned. And scammers: don’t hit a CEO who remembers each one of his clients at this division off by heart.

Received: (qmail 20244 invoked from network); 29 Aug 2007 02:53:00 -0500
Received: from fe.e9.5646.static.theplanet.com (HELO hazel.phpwebhosting.com) (70.86.233.254)
  by 192.168.1.211 with SMTP; 29 Aug 2007 02:53:00 -0500
Received: (qmail 28666 invoked by uid 99); 29 Aug 2007 07:48:34 -0000
Date: 29 Aug 2007 07:48:34 -0000
To: [Omitted]
Subject: [SPAM] BBB Complaint for Jack Yan [Case id: #8763cea8a4ec561bc12d225f1b1c9b25]
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: CF1AD1@bbb.com
Reply-To: A82845@bbb.com
Content-Type: multipart/related;
   boundary="=_aac2ae612d81d07b20aa7471e6c078d5"
Message-ID:
X-MSKTag: [SPAM]
X-MSK: SF=0x20

 
Dear Mr./Mrs. Jack Yan (JY&A Consulting)

You have received a complaint in regards to your business services.
Use the link below to view the complaint details:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND VIEW DOCUMENTS FOR CASE #D606BF

Complaint Case Number: D606BF
Complaint Made by Consumer Mrs. Marcia E. Worthington
Complaint Registered Against: Jack Yan of JY&A Consulting
Date: 05/14/2007/

Instructions on how to resolve this complaint as well as a copy of the original complaint can be obtained using the link below:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND VIEW DOCUMENTS FOR CASE #D606BF

Disputes involving consumer products and/or services may be arbitrated. Unless they directly relate to the contract that is the basis of this dispute, the following claims will be considered for arbitration only if all parties agree in writing that the arbitrator may consider them:
Claims based on product liability;
Claims for personal injuries;
Claims that have been resolved by a previous court action, arbitration, or written agreement between the parties.

The decision as to whether your dispute or any part of it can be arbitrated rests solely with the BBB.

The BBB offers its members a binding arbitration service for disputes involving marketplace transactions. Arbitration is a convenient, civilized way to settle disputes quickly and fairly, without the costs associated with other legal options.

© 2007 Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For the last few months, my Blogger account gets around eight to twelve blog spams a day. These are folks who use automated programs to feed in fake comments, containing their URLs, into blogs. The good thing about Vox is that, knock on wood, I have been free of this junk.
   I have to wonder whether blog spammers are plain wasting their time. Comments on my other blog are moderated. When their posts appear, they are blindingly obvious. Most are signed ‘Anonymous’ and in the first-line preview that Blogger gives you, it’s clear their words have nothing to do with the post.
   Blog spammers simply are making blogs about as useless as email. I remember when email communications were more collegial, respectful. Now, most of email is spam. For a time in 2006, I would surf the blogs first, then check my emails, because I didn’t want to deal with spam (today, McAfee SpamKiller, admittedly, does a reasonable job and my inbox remains around the 80 mark).
   Some folks, for whom blogging is just a hobby, will leave the blogosphere, and then to whom will the blog spammers market?
   And, let’s face it, who is dumb enough to buy off those cretins anyway? Get with the 21st century: consumers have become more and more savvy, and, blog spammers, no one gives two hoots about you or the crap you are flogging.