Because I’m senior enough to have “spending authority,” an unfortunate fact of life for me at work is that I get a lot of cold sales emails. Most of them I just delete or report as spam, but occasionally I get one that is so ridiculously bad or offensive that I feel I must address… Read More: Wow, AT&T Fiber, this is a ridiculously bad sales email »
I received this email at 1:15 this morning: When I saw it this morning, I was confused. I have never before received an email from “loyaltygateway.com”, and I was asleep at 1:15am, not placing an “order” to be confirmed by this email as its subject implies. It sure looks like spam, right? Well, it turns… Read More: It’s 2020, and companies still don’t know how to send… »
Recently, I wrote about what prompted me to add Blue State Digital to my global kill file. Today, CQ Engage, a service offered by CQ Roll Call, joins in that dubious honor. The things you need to do to be a reputable bulk mail service provider are actually very simple and straightforward: Publish an anti-spam… Read More: “CQ Engage” bulk mail service provider enters my global kill… »
If you are active online in liberal politics, you’ve probably received email from a company called Blue State Digital, even if you didn’t realize it. Blue State Digital is a digital advocacy platform used almost exclusively by liberal organizations and candidates. If you get email from Democratic candidates, a lot of it comes from Blue… Read More: Why Blue State Digital just joined my global kill file »
[See Adding malicious IPs in DNSBLs to iptables automatically for a new and improved version of this that uses iptables instead of hosts.deny, which is necessary since tcpwrappers is mostly deprecated at this point.] I run my own mail server, which means that there are hackers trying 24×7 to break into the server by connecting to… Read More: Adding malicious IPs in DNSBLs to hosts.deny automatically »
Much has been written about the fact that Zynga is evil. From my own experience, I’d like to add massively incompetent and law-breaking to the list of adjectives that accurately describe them. A number of days ago, I decided to give Words With Friends, a Scrabble™-like game, on my smart-phone. I was bored, and I wasn’t… Read More: My own small encounter with the evil that is Zynga »
I’ve recently started receiving a lot of spam from people claiming that they got my email address from Cision. Needless to say, I never gave my email address to Cision, nor have I ever in any way given them permission to spam me themselves or give my email address out to other people. Cision is… Read More: Cision is evil »
Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect. One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions… Read More: BBYO management: incompetent or merely stupid? »
In June, I wrote about a technique used by spammers to harvest names and email addresses of “live” targets for their spam. In a nutshell: you post an ad to Craigslist; the spammer sends you an automated email which makes you think that maybe the sender is interested in your ad; you send a response,… Read More: New technique from the Craigslist spammers »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More: Craigslist email-reply scam and what Craigslist could do to fix… »