Spam fallout

15 Jun 2004

I’ve been an accidental casualty in a spam campaign.

There’s a spammer sending out links some affiliate program he belongs to. The affiliate’s URL is very similar to a domain I own, and this moron spammer mistyped the affiliate URL. All the sudden I start getting spam complaints. But it took a day for someone to actually send me a copy of the spam they were complaining about. Until I saw it, I assumed that someone had spoofed my email address as the sender of the spam.

simpleleads.net is the spammer’s site.
simpleads.net is my site.

Spammers are scumbags. And the stupidity of this spammer has caused me a whole lot of problems.

To make matters worse, the mis-typed URL that links to my site instead of his was the address for the opt-out link. So people that think an opt-out request actually works are flocking to my site and complaining. I had to put up a page at the URL of the accidental spam link explaining what happened.

Graham
June 15, 2004 12:23 PM

Man. That really sucks. Sorry to hear that, Adam.

Christoph C. Cemper
June 15, 2004 11:48 PM

Adam,

This is hardcore bad luck… I would hate it and find your landing page great.… I think that’s the best you can do about that…

After all various worms and spam-bots are sending out stuff all the time with out domains, isn’t it? I get around 20-30 MTA error messages from unreceivable mails back to any-spammer-word@mydomain.com … don’t you too? What can we do about THAT? being the victim to send out penis pills and mortgage spam to unknown people with our good names?

best regards,christoph

mashby
June 16, 2004 5:41 AM

Adam,

I can’t think of a worse snafu to be caught up in. FWIW, I think you handled it in the best manner possible. It had to be a pain to go through, but it looks like you’ve really kept your head high on this one. Nice job.

July 5, 2004 9:26 PM

Did you consider putting a redirect at that address on your site forwarding to simpleleads.net ?

Lijit Search

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