Comments on: The Freemasons are Spamming me!

By: Martin Faulks

Martin Faulks — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 14:42:46 +0000

Its a real mailing list for masons I get it. I am sure its just an error.

By: Karen

Karen — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 20:20:39 +0000

Yeah, he’s guilty on that count, but that didn’t really become a mandatory thing until the advent of spam-viruses that forged From lines from compromised machines’ address books… and if he’s manually maintaining the list, I’m sure he feels he can just ignore those. And mostly, he can… mistyping is relatively rare, and malicious is gonna get in no matter what. Heck, you can bypass the Phoenyx’ confirmation if you just put a little effort into it: sign up a disposable address, confirm from it, then request an address change. Comes a point when extra “security” isn’t worth the extra trouble for legitimate users.

At any rate, I imagine it’s just a case of “let’s yank the Mason’s chain…” I’ve found myself subscribed to, or at least getting confirmations from, the occasional fringe mailing list, and it’s generally pretty obvious that somebody’s hassling a technologically struggling list owner. Hasn’t happened to a Phoenyx list yet, probably because we don’t look like an easy mark, and because roleplaying isn’t an overly controversial subject. Or, well, it can be, but roleplaying fruitbats tend to be different from political or religious fruitbats, and seem to feel less compelled to take down sites they disagree with.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:42:00 +0000

My complaint on this one is that I’ve never signed up to this list. No ‘you must have forgotten you signed up’. I have no interest in the subject and have never even visited any Freemasonty sites.

I can only assume he’s not confirming subscribes (like The Phoenyx and every reputable site does), and my email address has been subscribed either accidentally by someone mistyping their own address, or maliciously for some reason.

By: Karen

Karen — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 15:21:19 +0000

Most of those are actually pretty legitimate problems. We’re just quieter about it at the Phoenyx… even with a confirmation scheme, people are often convinced that we’re spamming them.

1. This can happen very easily if you’re not running your own mail server. Upstream spam blockers are nice as long as you don’t mind false positives.

2. This is a real problem. People forget they subscribed with address #1, which is forwarded to address #2, and if site #1 strips the original names out of the Received headers, well, it’s just a blind carbon and we have no way of guessing at where it’s coming from.

3. Same here, only it means guy with address #1 accidentally typed address #3 into his forwarder, which is worse because at least in the previous situation, the guy might eventually remember he has address #1, especially when we can usually at least say “it’s coming through AOL.” In this case, though we have had to resort to emailing each and every AOL subscriber with a “this message was sent to address X” until the unlucky recipient got one.

4. This is pretty much the same as sitation 2.

5. Yeah, that happens. What’s better, though, is when somebody says “I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR THIS WHY AM I GETTING MAIL?!?!??!” and we can pull up both their request and confirmation and present them with the headers and politely ask “Shall we send these to your ISP admin then, because it appears someone has been using your account without your permission?” Nine times out of ten, they don’t even answer us after that, which is really disappointing.

All of this has tapered off in recent years, though, which I attribute to the fact that the only people who subscribe at all anymore know about mailing lists, and the rest wander off to web forums and blogs. Which means, I guess, that we’ll start attracting them again soon. Remind me again why I’d want to do that?