Dear sales representative who wants me to buy your company’s products, If I’ve emailed you a link to this blog posting, it’s probably because you’ve sent me multiple unsolicited sales emails. Welcome to the club of vendors from whom I’m unlikely to ever purchase anything! No unsolicited sales email I have ever received from a… Read More: Generic reply to unsolicited vendor sales emails »
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 »