This Space for Rent

Spam, or an attempt to verify email addresses for spam?

In my mailbox this morning: One of our users is looking into your background.

Email from Support Department of some alleged shared experiences website, complete with a link to a page showing, well, nothing. But nothing regarding an email address which, although valid, hasn't been used for about six years, and allegedly from people with professional contacts with me.

And, to demonstrate that they are trustworthy, their spam is bounced through a dialup IP address. *snort* Nice try, thimbleheads. You might get a better response if you whined about my mail server, but I doubt it.

Comments


Here's the flipside of your complaint: you're blocking all mail from me, and I'm trying to get in touch with you! (look for connections from 82-41-201-19.cable.ubr11.edin.blueyonder.co.uk or 213.239.59.58 (raq981.uk2net.com). You're still doing secondary DNS for one of my domains, and I'm moving soon ... can you drop me an email from somewhere I can reply to?

Charlie Stross website Sat Jun 12 03:37:24 2004

Well, that's because my mail server skillfully detected that you are using a Mac, and thus shunned you because Domeless Engines Aren't Respectable.

Actually, it's because postoffice couldn't figure out the reverse DNS for 82.39.144.134. (and it's not just Mastodon; my local freeBSD box doesn't seem to be able to puzzle out the IP address and the Linux box at work also claims that there's no reverse dns for it either.) I don't appear to be blocking blueyonder these days (the vast bulk of my blueyonder spam seems to be rooted boxes relaying spam, and they don't tend to wait around when postoffice tells them to take a number and come back later.

I strongly recommend blaming your cablemodem provider for inferior DNS. In fact, I'll take the lead of Maximum Leader Genius and lay the blame on everyone else, because it's obviously Not My Fault(tm).

David Parsons website Sat Jun 12 11:53:12 2004

And on sunday I got another spam from the pretend shared experience site, this one to a DIFFERENT email address and from a different spam server. And looking it up on the web shows a large wad of the exact same subject line in at least a dozen mailing addresses. Nice try, spammers. I'm not nearly desperate enough to bite on such an unattractive hook.

David Parsons website Sun Jun 13 11:23:10 2004

Comments are closed