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).

Jason Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 3:37 pm

Mare may or may not be right that the spam was sent to bring people here. But the owner of this blog is clearly benefiting from the spam. Without the benefit of increased traffic, why waste your money on the domain?

Rich Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 4:43 pm

Hi Jason,

The truth is it was just an impulse and what happens next is freefall. If I had anything to hide I’d certainly not be publishing “doubting” comments, and I certainly appreciate yours, because it’s exactly the kind of thing I’d be asking. BTW I notice from the logs that you didn’t look at any other pages before commenting, so before I continue allow me to http://boakes.org/hello”>introduce myself.

When I made the purchase, I justified the expenditure as follows:

I’m sick of spammers, I want to do something & this is an opportunity to directly affect the revenue of a spammer.
The cost is negligible compared to what I spend on antivirus and other software annually.
It will be interesting to see the traffic profile for the domain.
A possible negative effect is that if the domain is blacklisted, then my main domain may be negatively affected, but I can live with that.
A benefit is that more people become aware of sites like SpamHuntress, where there is useful discussion about comment spam - we cannot technically or legally stop link spam unless it’s fully understood, and people like Ann Elisabeth are doing an awesome job in helping that understanding. This is my small contribution.

So I bought the domain, wrote the article and set up the redirect.

Going forward it is my intention is to publish an analysis of the traffic that is generated by the MyNiceEmailAt domain. To my knowledge such a study has not been conducted before so it may provide some useful insight into the economic model of the spammer. If anyone knows of similar work, then RSVP because the authors methods may be useful to follow.

Rich

David Adam Edelstein Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 7:25 pm

Nicely done! What a hoot. I got hit by this spammer too.

JoeChongq Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 7:51 pm

Great job Rich. If I had found a domain like this I certainly would have picked it up too. It may not really hurt the spammer much, but it certainly makes them look stupid.

For those wondering why a spammer would spam for a domain he doesn’t own yet, maybe they think the domain won’t be blacklisted if it doesn’t exist yet. By the time Google crawls their victims they would have bought the domain and benefitted from the links. It is hard to tell what (if anything) is going on in their heads.

Andy Merrett Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 7:55 pm

Of course it doesn’t help your PR at all…

You could’ve bought it, hidden your ID, and not promoted it, because some people who don’t bother to read the blurb will assume that you are the spammer.

kurma Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 9:04 pm

I received some comments too - I suspect this comes from India, judging from the spammer ‘name’ selection

Carol Says:
September 17th, 2005 at 11:57 pm

Just a thought… what if the spammer has the foresight that if something like this happens, maybe those who purchased the domains would not renew them a year later? Others who got spammed might not remove the link because it’s now pointing to a legitimate site like this. A year later, if the domain is not renewed, the spammer returns to buy it and puts his website up and enjoys the hundreds or thousands of available links pointing to his website…. !!!

Jo Fish Says:
September 18th, 2005 at 12:13 am

Got spammed by someone named “SANY”, with a “nice blog” comment. Looked like spam, cut and pasted the URL to see where it was from, and zoom-zoom here I am.

Thanks for your help, I guess. Hope I don’t see any more spam from that URL. Been very happy since upgrading to the new version of MT and being able to control my comments.

Now if there was just some way to control the trackback spam besides turning off trackbacks…

Tish Says:
September 18th, 2005 at 1:53 am

Cheers for beating the spammer to the punch! I got one innocuous sounding comment from this domain yesterday and wondered why it was hitting a dead link also… And just checked my mail and saw the new one today. Stupid spammers, I wondered what they were trying to sell also ;-)

Heidi Says:
September 18th, 2005 at 3:02 am

Aw….I was just following one single “nice site” sort of comment… Could it be that it was someone that wanted to be anonymous? There’s no ad, no long comments only a single phrase. Sometimes when I have to fill in an email field but I don’t want to give info to sniffers, I put heidi@addyonmysite.com. Maybe there are folks looking for that domain too!

Still, it’s a wonderful joke that you’ve bought the domain, and it cracked me up. Nice!

boakes.org