Gads, I was spammed.

October 13, 2001 6:37 PM

Gads, I was spammed.
posted by raaka to Bugs at 6:37 PM (26 comments total)

Yes? Okay. By whom?
posted by bjgeiger at 6:42 PM on October 13, 2001

Try SpamCop. They do good work.
posted by boaz at 6:45 PM on October 13, 2001

For you, I suggest Spamcop as above. if it's not used much, you should shut down that address too. For Matt, I would suggest WPoison, a web spider trap.
posted by boaz at 7:26 PM on October 13, 2001

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. There seems to be someone here who decides, occasionally, to do a favor for a fellow user and to sign them up for lots of mailing lists, especially for porn. It happened to me a couple of months ago. I assume it was someone who didn't agree with some thing I wrote.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 8:55 PM on October 13, 2001

Yeah, my solution is just to use a free email service on my profile page, so I can drop it if it starts collecting crap. Fortunately, there is a nearly endless supply of those on the internet.
posted by boaz at 9:00 PM on October 13, 2001

How incredibly immature. If everyone else isn’t getting mass spammed then someone is signing up others for mailing lists.

This gives more fuel to impugn the community. “Don’t get involved with MetaFilter, if they don’t like you they’ll sign you up for spam.” Pathetic.
posted by raaka at 9:07 PM on October 13, 2001

Someone's signed me up for some crap recently as well. Though I don't use it for MeFi, Mailshell is a good tool, too.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:26 PM on October 13, 2001

Happened to me last week. The really bad thing about it is not the initial wave of porn spam. Farbeit from me to complain about free nekkidness. The really bad thing is the second, third, and fourth waves of spam that result from the porn assholes selling your addy to every huckster with a mass mail client. Before last week, I'd get maybe one or two pieces of spam a day. Now I get four or five an hour, and they seem to be actually increasing in frequency.

Oh well. A relatively minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. Nothing a few clicks of the mouse won't fix.
posted by Optamystic at 10:01 PM on October 13, 2001

I wondered were the hell all that came from out of the blue last week. Now I know. I do not like it personally.
posted by bjgeiger at 11:09 PM on October 13, 2001

raaka: that's the exact same e-mail I got. I figured dotster or efax has somehow got my address out, I guess not. I think there might be a mass mailer combing user addresses.
posted by geoff. at 11:13 PM on October 13, 2001

I got the same spam, which has been reported to spamcop. I'm also a user of dotster and efax, so who knows.

I've got a spambot sniffer setup, but I disabled it a couple weeks ago, due to the increased processing it required. I should put it back in action.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:16 AM on October 14, 2001

I’ve never heard of dotster and never used efax.
posted by raaka at 1:24 AM on October 14, 2001

Those little Red Devils are hamming it up,
sending WhoreMail potted meat.
Can no one devise an Armour
against this unbid Treet?
posted by Opus Dark at 3:41 AM on October 14, 2001

Is it better to request to be removed from spam with opt-out links or would this just generate more spam by confirming that the address is valid?

posted by DBAPaul at 9:58 AM on October 14, 2001

Never use a spammer's opt-out links. Those will put you on a list of people who read their e-mail, and result in even more spam.

If someone signs you up for a bunch of porn lists, contact Matt -- he can probably take a look at the IP addresses that recently requested your profile, and that might provide some clues about who is doing this.
posted by rcade at 10:51 AM on October 14, 2001

Another thing you can do, if you have a web site and access to its server logs: Include a graphic from your site on your MetaFilter profile (example). Anyone who views your profile on MetaFilter will show up in your server logs.
posted by rcade at 11:04 AM on October 14, 2001

Goddamn. I just got a spam with headers addressed to "[e-mail]" so someone did this willfully.

I fucking hate people that pull petty, immature, cowardly shit like this. It's times like this that I wish Karma was real and they would get payback for pulling this kind of stupid shit.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:09 PM on October 14, 2001

In the Mail.app with OS X, there's a bounce feature I've started using in hopes of fending off the recent increase in spam (which is not, according to the addresses used, the result of my email address being pillaged from Metafilter). A surprising amount of the spam, maybe 40 percent, includes an address that does not bounce back my bounce. I can only hope those accounts, then, are real, and they're marking my address down as out of service.
posted by Mo Nickels at 1:25 PM on October 14, 2001

I had to take down my ICQ number because of all the spam. Even though normal users have to request authorisation this stuff just kept spewing forth - and it's much more annoying than email.
So these spammers obviously know their trade - not to mention the odd disgruntled user who puts forward the addresses of those he wants to get back at.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:37 PM on October 14, 2001

Oh, Karma is real, you just don't often get the pleasure of seeing it do it's thing.
posted by dong_resin at 3:35 PM on October 14, 2001

oh! I wondered where all the porn spam was coming from all of a sudden. I thought it was from someplace I'd surfed & signed up for updates...or from some spambot coming thru my homepage. Never occurred to me it might be malicious. I just deleted them. Should I be saving the e-mails so somebody who actually knows something about return paths can track the culprit to his lair?
posted by realjanetkagan at 5:20 PM on October 14, 2001

we should make something out of this and launch a spam posse. Hunt 'em down and shut em' down by all means necessary. I'm down for whatever.
posted by chaz at 11:53 PM on October 14, 2001

Just picking up on a couple of things mentioned above. I switched from ICQ to trillian, one of those IM clients that supports a variety of different programmes (ICQ, AIM, Mirc etc), and have had no IM spam since (about three months), which is odd because my ICQ details haven't actually changed... this tool is pretty useful if you want to leave an email address online on a personal site, but don't want spam-harvesters to find it. I don't know whether you could use this when filling in your Metafilter profile, though.
posted by Cobbler at 2:24 AM on October 15, 2001

Like others, I just began receiving a lot of spam out of the blue as well (That Excel in life email). Because my profile address is my real address (I'm changing it now), I can't verify if it was from MeFi or not. But in case someone is trying to tally how many people have suddenly and coincidentally started receiving spam, I just wanted to add my case.
posted by Hankins at 11:35 AM on October 15, 2001

I wrote a little javascript that converts Latin characters to ISO number code (much the same as the tool that Cobbler linked to). I use it all the time to hide my email addresses from nasty spiders. Unfortunately it doesn't do much good if it is getting nicked by hand, but it might keep you out of a lot of trouble. Feel free to use my script. It runs on the client so you can use it offline (which you should if you don't know the host).
Convert your email address
posted by Taco at 9:52 AM on October 19, 2001