Allegedly. I normally ignore this stuff, but I was bored so I thought I’d see what happens.
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I hate spam. You know that. Unsolicited emails offering all kinds of crappy offers that no-one should ever want to do. However, I shop online with Sainsbury’s so when I get an email from them with their offer of the month, I took a look.
“Spend £80 three times by the 11th March and we’ll give you £50.”
Initially, that sounds like a reasonable offer. You don’t often get £50 free. But then, if you really think about it, you realise that it’s in fact a shit offer. They want me to spend £240 in one month, on food. I’m not sure I spend that in a year. Well, OK, I probably do spend that in a year, but in a month? Puhleeze. Wake up Sainsbury’s and offer sensible offers that people might want. That way you might start to catch up with Tesco.
I just got hit by some SPAM. Initially I was actually impressed because it didn’t lie to me. It was quite clearly there in the title “Marketing Mailshot from xxx”. I read it, half thinking it might have been a real email. But it was SPAM. I knew that for certain as it was sent to an email address that only ever receives SPAM. I was particularly intrigued though, because the “company” had telephone numbers with the same dialling code as my area. Wow, a spammer in Southampton… interesting.
After a little research, I found out where the guy lives, and, more importantly, a personal email address of his. By spoofing the headers, I sent an email back to him which was “from” the email address he had spammed me on. The email read:
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Hi {name},
Thought I’d fire off a quick email to find out your opinion’s on SPAM. Do you enjoy getting random nonsense you have no interest in? Getting BS emails which are clearly unsolicited? Like this one?
Yeh, I hate it to. You might want to think twice about advertising your company name using such shocking tactics as purchasing email addresses, most of which are so old, you must have been had by whoever flogged it to you.
By the way, how is {name of place where he lives} this time of the year? Scary, isn’t it.
So please leave me alone. And I’ll leave you alone.
Yours disrespectfully,
MT
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I gave my full name in the From: as Matt “I hate SPAM” Thornton. So if he had half a brain, he might be able to find me. I’ll wait and see if he does and maybe comments on this topic.
In follow up to this entry I just had to post again. I have just received the actual email… the “original” if you will. I wanted to show you guys, but it was impossible to take a screenshot, so you’ll just have to take a look yourself. I’ve sanitised it as much as possible and removed the forwards etc. Ignore that little bit of Javascript error… I simply cannot believe people think that this actually came from Hotmail.
I asked the sender if they thought it was real. She (no comment) said she thought it was. When told it was a hoax, she said “OH! Nevermind!”. The problem is I do mind! Not only does it mean I’m going to get SPAM for tea but it is such a horrendous waste of resources.
What I also don’t understand, never have, never will, is why, when people actually forward these things on, do they never ever remove all the crap at the top of the email!? It’s right there, plain as day. A simple scroll and delete would remove it, but nope…
I counted how many email addresses were on the page… 1117. That is a shitload of email addresses, and what’s even worse? My email address is now on there as it gets thrown around the Internet for people to abuse. Monkeys.
Sp@m: the myst.eries xp1ained!!!
I have to stop writing about spam, but anyway… the new breed of spam is beginning to amuse me – i.e. the auto robot spam that is posting comments to my blog. For example, one of my posts here was about the company “boikot” – and the robots thoought that a good place to put spam about viagra. They even try to add “relevant” comments… “I have found the discussion here to be most useful”.
I’ve never done it; but if I was ever to send out spam (or write viruses for that matter) then I reckon I would do a much better job of what is actually written in the emails. Instead of the usual “OPEN ME OPEN ME! I’m not a virus or spam or anything, honest” I reckon I could write them so people actually do open them.
And no, I wouldn’t rely on advertising that freaking Paris Hilton video either.