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).

Marlin Says:
October 1st, 2005 at 9:17 pm

Thanks for buying up that domain!

Peach Says:
October 2nd, 2005 at 4:58 pm

I think it’s great you bought the Domain to stop the spam….and this is a good forum, but only for people who get to it by ways other than you ’spamming’their Blogs by commenting.

You are doing what you vowed to change. I still keep getting comments like ‘Nice Site’ from people lilke Donny. I already know you are here. Please Stop leaving comments.

Or are we all being trashed, and this is a perfect domain for advertisers and you are really the enemy??

I certainly DO NOT get why you are still leaving comments on
my BLog……maybe we are all being bulldozed with Bull.

[12 minutes pass then Peach comments again]

Listen,

I think I understand what is going on now. But I already have Spam Blacklist and it is working fine. I haven’t had spam in a very long time until I found you.

If a spammer leaves junk(comment) on my Blog and it leads me here. Then I cannot copy him to add to my Spam Blacklist and I will just keep getting his same spam comments that lead me here.

Does it stop that one spammer?…. and then I’ll still get others? I really do not understand. If you are not ‘Donny’ and he is a spammer, then I could have knocked him out already after only one spam with my Blacklist.

But I cannot knock him out with my BLocker the first time because it brings me here. So please excuse this non-techie, but I do not understand how this is helping the ‘ongoing’ spam(same person) if it always brings me here.????

Rich Says:
October 3rd, 2005 at 4:16 pm

Hi Peach,

it looks like you twigged that it’s not me that controls the spam-run. Your main question therefore is about who has been stopped and how, for which the answer is: my actions stop one particular spammer from profiting from one particular spam run, because he can’t use the clicks to channel viewers to a website promoting pills, porn, poker, or whatever else is paying his bills.

As for how it’s helping the ongoing spam problem, well, hopefully the traffic analysis will be interesting to some spam fighters, but ultimately, on it’s own, this small little act of defiance can’t do much.

Rich

kwa Says:
October 9th, 2005 at 8:54 pm

Rich, when do you plan to make and publish the traffic analysis?

Rich Says:
October 9th, 2005 at 9:46 pm

I’d reckoned on leaving it a month and then taking a look, which will be next weekend, plus or minus a few days when I have time.

The hits have dropped off almost entirely now, with new arrivals being in the single figures each day.

The analysis may take several iterations if people can come up with some good suggestions. The logging is all done to a DB so what I might do is extract the relevant data and make it available so others can see the raw stuff and analyse it too.