Magnet Spam

October 28, 2001 3:49 PM

Great spam I just got (inside)
posted by mathowie (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 3:49 PM (16 comments total)

Three hundred thousand search engines?

posted by Su at 4:06 PM on October 28, 2001

i've gotten that spam myself, but sadly not for a-list.
posted by moz at 4:07 PM on October 28, 2001

Yeah, I get that occasionally, and I've nothing to do with the a-list.
posted by fidelity at 4:29 PM on October 28, 2001

Shoo...

All I ever get are the Hot Teen Sluts Will Give You A Credit Card, Free Viagra and Increase Your Internet Business!! ones
posted by y2karl at 5:35 PM on October 28, 2001

I got one today that actually made me laugh:

Free Advice from a Top Attorney! + Free Bread Maker!


posted by jeffbarr at 5:39 PM on October 28, 2001

grrr.. i've gotten that one more than a couple times.. the crappy part about this traffic magnet spam is that it has been known to go through my guestbook, email all the people in there, and send them the same message asking if they want my web page (not their's) on this service thing.. and people always end up emailing me asking me why they're getting stuff like that.
posted by lotsofno at 6:43 PM on October 28, 2001

Did you get that nifty image of your site, the magnet, and people being magnetically attracted to your site??
posted by mkn at 6:48 PM on October 28, 2001

Did you get that nifty image of your site, the magnet, and people being magnetically attracted to your site??

Yeah! I grabbed just the text, but there was an animation of people being painfully magnetized to MetaFilter.

I find it interesting that people still thing search engine submission is a viable business. Especially now that google is basically the champion, and they find you, and traditional places like Altavista have gone to great lengths to ensure that people are using bots to spam search engines (there was an article about altavista's new submission with the random image code trick, saying how 99% of their previous submission were entirely automated).
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:58 PM on October 28, 2001

"Free Advice from a Top Attorney! + Free Bread Maker!"

Sounds like something Lionel would do...

(RIP, Phil).
posted by davidmsc at 8:42 PM on October 28, 2001

I've gotten that spam for my site as well, and anyone who had posted to my blog and left an email address also received it.
quite annoying.
posted by iamjacksamnesia at 6:16 AM on October 29, 2001

people being painfully magnetized to MetaFilter

kindah like what happens already?
posted by mattpfeff at 7:03 AM on October 29, 2001

I've received that spam many times myself, but what makes it a little more interesting than most "promote your domain name" spams, is that some actually came with a little screenshot of my site embedded in the email. Very clever.
posted by misterioso at 8:00 AM on October 29, 2001

That magnet spam has its images tagged with your email address... so if you view it (in HTML format, and since I have to use Outlook at the office there is no other format) they know you're a live email address. I hate that. Hate that, hate that. Sometimes I wish I were a 31337 h4x0r so I could track those people down and hack them back to the Stone Age. If I could delete just one spammer's address database I'd feel I had finally made a concrete contribution to the greater good....
posted by Sapphireblue at 9:05 AM on October 29, 2001

You'd be, like, the robin hood of h4x0r5...(or is that r081n h00d)
posted by jpoulos at 1:30 PM on October 29, 2001