Tags: Security, Society, Spam, WordPress
Spammed by MyNiceMailAt .com
September 17th, 2005, by Rich.
Hopefully I just spoiled a spammer’s whole week. How? I bought the domain that he’s trying to promote (MyNiceMailAt.com) before he did.
When I receive comment spam which doesn’t obviously link to a gambling, pornographic or pharmaceutical site then I usually do a little investigation to see what’s on the site, who owns it, why they’re spamming me, etc.
In the last 24 hours I’ve been hit by comment spam promoting MyNiceMailAt.com.
- I tried to look at mynicemailat.com, and it didn’t exist; so
- I tried to find the domain ownership records, and they didn’t exist either.
MyNiceMailAt.com was an unregistered domain, being promoted by a spammer.
- I like to do my bit for hindering spammers; so
- I bought the domain, before the spammer could; so
- the entire spam run has been a waste of the spammer’s time and resources.
Useful Info
- If you’d like to learn more about comment spam, I highly recommend Ann Elisabeth’s SpamHuntress blog.
- This is not the first time such action has been taken by a spam recipient, last year jagk.com was similarly snapped up, and now has a regularly updated spam blacklist that you can add to your .htaccess file (if you don’t run your blog server, tell your administrator about it).
September 17th, 2005 at 11:40 am
I’m not sure of having understood what has happened. I’ve received 2 comments on my weblog, clicked the link and it brought me here.
Curiously, yesterday the link read not found, but today it lead me here. I’m confused at this point: were they spam-comms? They were signed “Donny” and “Gaane”.
Thks, anyway.
September 17th, 2005 at 11:58 am
Hi mjm,
What’s happened is this: we were both spammed by the same person - but - they hadn’t actually registered the domain which they were promoting when the spam run started.
Yesterday, no web site was registered at the domain, so when you (and I) looked at the URL, there was just an error message instead of a website.
Today, I was able to register the domain, and redirect it to this story on my website, explaining what’s happened.
What you received was comment spam, what I’ve done is to remove the financial gain from the spammer, by registering the site before they can.
September 17th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
What a smart idea. I think I might actually leave this spam comment up. Ha! Beat those spammers!
September 17th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Heh. That’s funny. :)
September 17th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
Who says this blog is not owned by spammers to collect email addresses?
/dons tinfoil hat
September 17th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
September 17th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
I just got the same spam link in my blog comments. I guess he didn’t get the memo that you had bought the domain name! Bravo!
September 17th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
Mare:
You wouldn’t know this, unless you were already in the spam fighting circles. Rich has had a clear stance on this a long time. He’s one of the good guys, attested by his long history in fighting spam. As so many other bloggers do. We know nothing about blog spam, then we get spammed to oblivion, and start fighting the phenomena.
Welcome to the club, so to speak…
September 17th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
HAH! Thanks for making just another spam comment on my site into something better. You got ‘em where it counts, you rawk! :-D
September 17th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
Thanks for buying this up. Out of the 195 comments I got yesterday, 193 of them were spam for this domain, and MTBlacklist let about 10 of those get approved because they were on recent enough entries.
How dumb to you have to be to promote a domain you don’t already own [sheesh!] Keep up the good fight!