NiallOK’s Blog

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A friend of mine and a newspaper journalist (two separate people) recently emailed me - one to announce her housewarming party, the other to apologise in case she’d spammed me. Nothing unusual there, no - until I looked at the “To:” lines of the emails. The first person had emailed me along with about sixty other people, the second one had about twenty other recipients - all of them in the “To:” line - so all of them now know all the email addresses of all the others.

I’ve replied to both of them, pointing them at the BCC Please web site. Whether they’ll pay attention or not, I dunno. It’s not a case of email etiquette as such (well, okay, it kinda IS really) but it’s always seemed like common sense to me. If you’re sending something out to many people, don’t do it in such a way that all the email addresses are visible to everyone receiving the message. That’s just silly. I mean - I certainly don’t want my personal email address publicised to all your friends and aquaintances and I’m sure most of them will feel the same.

Anyway… rant over…

I just got an email, that - if I click the convoluted and badly spoofed “genuine looking” URL in it - sends me an EXE file to download (called video.exe). Strangely enough, it’s fairly obvious from the URL that it’s going to do that so I NARROWLY avoid clicking it.

Nothing strange there. Nothing strange either about the collection of random words from the dictionary at the bottom of the email, after the URL, designed to fool spam detectors in email clients. They don’t work. The email arrived in the Junk Email folder.

No, the strange thing in this email was the subject, which was:

“what a stupid face you have here, Niall”

Great, eh? I mean, I’ve seen kind and thoughtful spammers, but rude and offensive ones? Yes, - that subject TOTALLY endeared me, egging me on further - definitely made me want to open the email and download and run whatever they told me to…

Yes…

Totally.

Michele Neylon got spam from an Irish company today (it’s not his first time either) - and he’s not the only one.

Today I got a completely unsolicited junk advertising mail from a Cork-based company called ‘Micromail’ promoting their “Interactive Developer Workshops” and yes, it ticks all the boxes too. - Badly formatted HTML email with a spammy subject line, totally impersonal, un-automated unsubscription (involving sending the guy an email at his personal address with the subject “STOP”) and yes, no explanation on why I was chosen to receive this email.

Companies need to learn that this is not acceptable. For some reason, I used to think Irish companies were above peddling their wares via this cheap and abusive use of the Internet, but that thought was proven wrong before.

I’m not sure where Micromail in particular took my email address from, or what made them add it to their mailing list, thinking that I would be interested in their seminars on “Codegear RAD studio” or “JBuilder” software. I never dealt with them before or attended any of their seminars. In fact I’d never heard of them until today. Maybe they should read this… or THIS.

The fact remains that I’m not interested in their wares, nor will I ever be - and nor should anyone, while this is their way of advertising it.

I think not…

The text at the bottom reads:

If you don’t wish to receive such messages, please send your domain name to jj([at])dedik_dot_biz to remove your site from our list.

What bare faced cheek! “We know this is junk/spam, but just email us with your domain name and we’ll remove you… (*wink!*)” … just how many domain names or email addresses have these assholes harvested?

A quick Whois on the IP address of the commenter points me to the “Asia Pacific Network Information Centre”… guess that doesn’t really help much…

As said elsewhere:

I 100% believe that email is fake or that would be additional bonus to the spammer if I was stupid enough to send a mail. Why the email address not in clear text? Spammer is afraid of spammers, too?

I’m sure I’m not the only one getting these spam comments on my blog (ShiteDrivers.com gets almost 100 of them per week at the moment, and others have gotten them too).

My query is… how can they be stopped? I don’t want them appearing in my Akismet at all - I just want them deleted. Perhaps I should have Spam Karma, but I found the last time I had that installed that it was deleting valid comments far too often…

Am I the only one to have gotten spam from the web site of “Living magazine”?

It reads like this:

Dear NIALL,

With Christmas almost upon us what better time to unwrap our brand new website [URL Removed]?

In case you hadn’t heard [URL Removed] is your chance to enjoy everything that Living Magazine has to offer - plus a lot more besides - on your computer.

At the site you’ll find the very latest Christmas edition of Living Magazine available to download. Plus, you’ll also to able to access recipes, tips and lots more.

And if you like what you see online why not register to become a Living Online member. That means you’ll receive Living Magazine in its online format from now on and will also be able to download coupons, enter fantastic competitions and take advantage of other exclusive member benefits.

Why not check out [URL Removed] and from all of us at Living we hope that you enjoy it and have a great Christmas too!

The Living Online Team

(I’m removing the URL ‘cos I’ve no intention of linking to them).

Why doth I protest so? - Well, I didn’t sign up for anything - this is pure unsolicited commercial email of the lowest tackiest order.

The site itself is pretty poor by any design standards. It’s particularly unattractive to look at, has an unfriendly navigation system and it forces PDF pages on you where it could have easily have used - *shock!* - HTML!

Also, it offers nothing to me - I’m clearly not their target market. By the looks of it, they haven’t done any market research, just send out a bulk spam. Oh, and it’s run by that massive and sneaky Unilever organisation (the one that puts loads of similar products on the market that ‘compete’ with each other) but the “contact us” link on their web site goes to carelines@fexco.com - Fexco being an Irish based financial services company (… what???).

As Michele has said before, companies do themselves a lot of damage by using e-mail spam as a marketing methodology, and as I said in an e-mail to Fexco, I will be recommending to people NOT to use the web site.