How not to take care of readers
Chris wonders if Kos is selling email addresses of subscribers to spammers. He has a convincing tale.
Update: In comments, Ravenwood notes that spambots are probably scanning the user profile pages.
7 Responses to “How not to take care of readers”
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October 12th, 2005 at 8:41 am
I want to make it clear here that selling it is of course not the only way it got out. It could have been (and likely was) inadvertant for all I know. (I am talking to them about it.)
October 12th, 2005 at 9:32 am
I don’t read Kos, but I checked it out and they appear to have user profile pages for registered users. Picking a few random user profile pages, you can see that they publish the email address on the page:
http://www.dailykos.com/user/uid:40885
A spambot probably saw the page and harvested the address.
That is why Ravenwood’s Universe does not publish ANY email addresses. When my commenters leave their email address it is stored in the database but NEVER published to any of the web pages.
October 12th, 2005 at 9:54 am
Thanks.. I’ve posted an update to this effect on my site..
October 12th, 2005 at 10:27 am
I have a Yahoo! account that I use when I register for newsletters.
I clearly remember the *huge* increase in spam the day I signed up for the Opinion Journal.
The e-mail addy I used for this comment doesn’t get nearly as much spam as that one, and this one is stored in over a hundred blogs.
I never have enough time, but one of the things I wanted to do was to create two new Yahoo! accounts and sign one of them up to OJ, just to prove my theory.
October 13th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
This is why I habitually use a fake e-mail address to post comments. Given Uncle’s assurances, it’s unnecessary on his site, but since I can’t remember which sites are safe, I treat them all as unsafe.
Of course, a good privacy policy (“We never sell our users e-mail addresses or other personal information”) is just the beginning. You also have to judge whether the site administrator is clueful enough to not accidentally give it away.
October 13th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
It’s relatively easy to tell. Just look at others’ comments and hover your mouse over their names/handles. If nothing (or nothing but web URLs) turns up, it’s probably safe.
October 13th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
My email spam protection standard mischief is this:
1.Have one, easy to remember email address, that is not a person’s name, as the address that you give to real people only. Never type this into a form anywhere (Bad example: bgates@microsoft.com, jsmith@example.org, theses are easy to guess. Good example: sledghammer@example.com, cookiemonster@example.org, these are easy for a human to spell, but a spammer isn’t ever going to guess one of these when he spams jsmith@example.net, wbrown@example.net. ajones@example.net…etc)
2.Have a second email that is not easy for a human to spell, and would not be in anyone’s dictionary. An example would have letters and numbers, like 223rem762x39commie@example.com. Never give this email address out, except to sneakemail.com (payola free plug) You can sign-up for a free account which is good enough for text messages. If you need to receive a lot of attachments, it’s only like $2 a month.
3.When ever you buy something online, or sign up for a mailing list, just pop over to sneakemail.com and make a new email address. You have total control over this address, and if your online bookseller starts to send you a weekly CAN-SPAM, just turn it off until you want to order something else, or make a new address and kill the old one.
4.If get-a-cheap-mortgage.com ever sells your sneakemail address to dating-for-mutants.com you know exactly who did the dirty dead. Plus you can do something about it. Remember, computers are really good at remembering weird-ass email addresses like g534ysg2y0io52bt0t@sneakemail.com
5.if you ever need an email for a once only quickie message, try mailinator.com. Go over there now and see what kinda spam bob gets: http://mailinator.com/mailinator/maildir.jsp?email=bob. They even have RSS feeds.
6.If you ever want to post to a blog like Say Uncle, just lie. As long as the address looks valid, it will work (although the email I’m using now for this post is legit, I’m running an experiment).