insult to injury

19 years ago
Fuckin' spammers.
Tags:
Current Music: Plastic Noise Experience -- Kill The 6 ♬

23 Responses:

  1. hepkitten says:
    19 years ago at 4:10 pm

    The funniest part of that?

    A: Did you mean: "Best regards, Jamie Zawinski"

    B: Your search - "Best regards, Jamie Zawinski" - did not match any documents.

    The spammers are more polite than you :(
  2. endquote says:
    19 years ago at 5:23 pm

    I think that's how you know you've truly arrived.
  3. j_b says:
    19 years ago at 5:30 pm

    I was about to post that it could have been randomly generated, since they got your name wrong. Then I looked. No Zawinski or Zawinsky in the top 88,800 last names. Wow. Nevermind. Fuckin' spammers.
  4. down8 says:
    19 years ago at 6:16 pm

    You must be losing your shirt, what with giving out all that bonus cash.

    -bZj
  5. mapzter says:
    19 years ago at 7:08 pm

    It was sent from an IP in China, and the service they advertise is also hosted in China. chinanet.cn.net should just be wiped from the face of the net.
  6. autopope says:
    19 years ago at 7:39 pm

    I've had spammers taking my name in vain (and sending spam with my email addy as a bounce address). One in particular, it seems. Unfortunately, the web site of the ISP they're spamming through -- and the spam itself -- is written entirely in Turkish, so I'm a bit at a loss as to how to turn my attack-trained lawyer on them.

    Never mind. In another couple of years Turkey will join the EU, and if they're still up to it I'll be in position to get my lawyer to set up an extradition warrant and a private prosecution for hacking. Let's see how they enjoy life in a Scottish prison cell. Mutter, grumble ...
    • jwz says:
      19 years ago at 7:51 pm

      I get dozens of bounces a day from spam that used my return address (the usefulness of bounce messages having been thereby completely destroyed) but this is the first time I've seen my name in one...
      • chrislightfoot says:
        19 years ago at 8:39 pm

        One useful trick (if you can bear to deal with procmail etc.) is to arrange for your outgoing mail to have a message-id which is of the form (say).

        random-string . hash(random-string, secret) @ domain

        then drop any mail which has a blank return path and whose body doesn't include a <>-bracketed string in the above form matching the right secret. This helpfully separates out the hundreds of bounces I get when fucking spammers forge my email address from the relatively few bounces I get when some idiot can't configure a mail server. (If you want a copy of the script I use for this ask, but it's not as if it would be hard to write your own.)

        Sadly most "anti-virus" programs are too dumb to use a blank return path so this doesn't filter out their stupid fucking "warning" messages. However, they do usually include a helpful copy of the virus or the key word "Symantec" so the spam filter learns to junk them fairly swiftly.
        • fo0bar says:
          19 years ago at 9:23 pm

          See, that doesn't work out well for people who have had their primary email address for a long time. I've had mine since 1997, jwz since... 1998? That can't be right.

          Anyways, last time I checked, I got about 1500 spams per day to my primary email address. Spamassassin catches about 95% of that, which leaves ~75 per day that I had to delete. My solution was to register a new catch-all domain and set up some procmail-fu to save foo@domain.com to a folder named "foo", and also to the spool. Then I converted as many lists and web accounts I could find to the new domain (IE, amazon@domain.com). When spam starts flowing into one of those boxes, I just redirect it to /dev/null.

          Okay, so that helps spam management down the road, but doesn't do anything for my main account's shitloads of spam. My solution: continue to use spamassassin, and anything that makes it through is send to one of those annoying autoresponder programs that asks for human verification before letting me see the mail. I hate those types of programs, but they works.

          Maybe I should just close everything and use gmail for my primary box. Cause, like gmail is the new friendster. Or something.
        • grumpy_sysadmin says:
          19 years ago at 11:24 pm

          Um. Outlook doesn't generate In-Reply-To. So you'll immediately stop receiving new mail (as opposed to replies) from any Windows user.

          Great plan!
          • chrislightfoot says:
            19 years ago at 11:28 pm

            Last time I checked, Outlook doesn't send all its mail with a blank return path.
            • grumpy_sysadmin says:
              19 years ago at 11:36 pm

              Ah, beg pardon, I conflated your two suggestions. Yeah, that would work. What you'd end up blocking is when punks like me just telnet to port 25, but maybe you don't care so much about that. You may also end up blocking certain (ecommerce or otherwise) web sites' notification emails.

              I'll still stick with SA (with the RBL rules on, it's outstanding), though, because it's Good Enough.
        • netik says:
          19 years ago at 4:02 am

          TMDA does this automagically. You might want to install that instead.

          The only downside is that all mail is considered to be spam, and that it's hard to educate new people on how to mail you when they mail you for the first time.
    • chrislightfoot says:
      19 years ago at 8:27 pm

      Oh, I shouldn't have thought so. The Communications Privacy Directive (especially in its UK implementation) is completely toothless.
      • autopope says:
        19 years ago at 1:06 am

        I was thinking Computer Misuse Act (as amended in, um, was it 1998?). Or the appropriate statute for forgery. CMA violations carry a sentence of up to 5 years' imprisonment, and best of all there's an extraterritoriality clause -- if you live in country A and attack a computer in country B, you can still be nailed under the CMA if one of A or B is the United Kingdom.
  7. torgo_x says:
    19 years ago at 7:50 pm

    In the future, we are all Jamie Zawinsky.
  8. smokedamage says:
    19 years ago at 11:42 pm

    ouch.
  9. owen says:
    19 years ago at 1:31 am

    I clicked the link, chuckled, and then moved on in my LJ readings. A few minutes later I went to sift through my spam trap to look for false positives, since I have been taking a scorched-earth policy to adding new SpamAssassin rules to my system. Lo and behold, I got the same spam!

    That's my story.
  10. ldy says:
    19 years ago at 11:34 pm

    Hi,
    I have a special offer available for you at our casino.

    [spam trimmed for your reading pleasure]

    Best regards,
    Jamie Zawinsky

    It was sent under the name of Hubert Velez. I didn't know you'd taken on a penname!

    I feel honored that you thought enough of me to invite me to your casino ;)

    (I only get about one piece of spam every day or three, so I thought the receipt of this worth mentioning.)

    Spammers are bastards, but they keep us closer together, Hubert.

Comments are closed because this post is 19 years old.