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).

Rich Says:
September 18th, 2005 at 9:29 am

Hi Carol, that’s the first comment that’s ever made me sound like Keanu Reeves going “Whoa”. You are absolutely right; if I let the domain ownership lapse, and the links remain, the (or any) spammer could benefit.

You’ve now got we wondering if/how this happens already when a domain expires. If anyone from any of the major search engine companies comes across this article and has any insight, please let us know how it’s handled.

In the mean time, I don’t need the links, please either delete any comments that mention MyNiceMailAt.com or change their url to this story (because the boakes.org domain is going nowhere).

Rich Says:
September 18th, 2005 at 11:06 pm

Incidentally the domain name has been added to Jay Allen’s MT Comment Spam Blacklist, which can be downloaded from here, more information here.

Rob Says:
September 19th, 2005 at 6:03 pm

Hah, what a great idea. Good job!

Paul Winkeler Says:
September 20th, 2005 at 4:48 pm

Hi
My site too received a nice brief kudo from mynicemailat.com and thus I ended up here. I mostly leave my postings closed nowadays until I get that MovableType security piece installed anyway.

Meanwhile I would like to draw your attention to voice-spam, otherwise known as telemarketing calls. With the advent of VoIP you can rest assured this will take off like wildfire especially once someone out starts paying for every message left on someone’s answering machine.
I have started gathering a list of known telemarketer caller-ids and am looking for ways to publicize this list. Any suggestions you might have are greatly welcomed.

Of course to use this list of caller-ids you do have to install a system capable of acting on them. For this I use Asterisk [www.asterisk.org] software and about $200 of hardware from Digium [www.digium.com] integrated into an old PC.

You can read more about this on my website at PBnJ Solutions.

PaulW

Herschel Says:
September 21st, 2005 at 6:56 pm

Rich,

I’ve heard that when a domain expires, the Google pagerank automatically goes away. But, if there are still other links around, those can build the PR back up when Google sees them again.

In this case I’d be surprised if that was their motive. For one thing, it may be a hard name to pick up when it expires. If there are a lot of links to the site (and Yahoo currently shows 687 links to that domain), it’ll be in relatively high demand by people that snap up expiring domain names to put ads on them. The going price for the expired domain name would be fair amount higher than what you paid for it, and the spammer would then have to compete with anyone else that notices all the incoming links to try to grab the domain.

I also just can’t imagine a spammer having such a long-term plan for a spam run, but who knows. My first guess was that it was a typo in the spam, and the spammer had already registered the domain that he meant to spam. Who knows.

SassyK Says:
September 22nd, 2005 at 4:44 pm

Ah hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha HA!

I think you are a genius! I think you are brilliant! I am your number one fan (in a good way)! You rock! Go get ‘em tiger! Mr Spammer is a complete moron and you are not.

When life gives you oranges - eat them. That’s what I say.

Matt Says:
September 23rd, 2005 at 1:04 pm

How irritating, to have that stupid “your site is realy interesting” comment left on just about every picture in my photoblog. Thanks for at least thwarting their advertisement. Pity we can’t track them down in real life …

kwa Says:
September 24th, 2005 at 12:54 am

Since I discovered SPAM, I’ve always wondered how interesting that was financially. Since fighting SPAM costs so much (mainly in time spent on filtering it, misconfigured servers making plenty of false positives as well as CPU usage), I wondered how much money a spammer can earn. I’m afraid the spammer earns less than the cost it produces…

I believe we are many extremly interested into your traffic (and financial) analysis of the potential benefit of this spamming event.