Blogger Directed Spam?
from the weird dept
Techdirt has received a couple of these emails today, and I'm wondering if it's a new spam campaign directed at bloggers. I don't want to post the full email (even with some obfuscation) because it may give away too much info about the site it's advertising (which I did not visit). The email sort of appears to be a long, rambling, legitimate, if slightly odd, attempt at asking for help in creating a "political blog". The writer asks a bunch of silly questions about blogging in general (which surfing around should teach them the answers to) and then mentions offhand, that they're also creating a weblog directory and ask specific information about "your blog". People send us email all the time asking for help or links, and they're often quite odd, but this one has quite a few spam characteristics as well. First, two small oddities: the email comes from a domain that is different than the one they're "promoting" and the name in the "from" is spelled just slightly differently than the name signed at the bottom of the email (Google turns up no links relating to either spelling of the name). However, there are a few more things that make me much more suspicious. The emails were sent to non-operational addresses at Techdirt. They both landed in our "catch-all" bin (which is mostly spam). However, both approximate legitimate Techdirt addresses (one for a former employee), but change the last letter of the address to something random. I have no idea why this would be done. Furthermore, the email ends with a random string of text, like many spam messages do these days. SpamAssassin (if you care) gives it a score of 6.7, well above the usual filter level of 5. However, since the email seems like it's at least trying to be legitimate, I'm wondering if it's a sneaky attempt by spammers/scammers to appeal to bloggers' general nature to help people out.
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No Subject Given
Although I'm baffled about the permutations of the once legit email address, without further information I'm inclined to think that they didnt actually know they were sending spam to a "blog", and that would remove some of the mystery. They may be merely trying to generate traffic to a link in the email.
I'll bet you'll see in the headers this spam came from a cable modem or dsl line, the sure sign of the amateur spammer.
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Got one too
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political....
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
Well, this was a case where it was questionable as to whether or not it was spam. The hope was that, by presenting the info about it, it would alert others not to assume it was legitimate. Sorry, I didn't realize we weren't supposed to help anyone else.
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yeop
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