Are you getting Spam from Crossfire Media?

Wed Jan 14 01:19:01 UTC 2009

Graeme Fowler wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 14:43 -0500, Reynold Guerrier wrote:
>   
>> My subscription to NANOG aged 3 months ago and I am receiving this spam too.
>> And this is my first post. I effectively think that someone might have crack
>> the email database of the Nanog list.
>>     
>
> Funny; I'm not in that sort of business and I haven't received that sort
> of spam. Funny also that both Reynold and JC have quite significant
> online presences (as determined from a quick Google) which reveal lots
> of interesting info - if you were a person interested in selling them
> something, anyway. Especially wireless kit.

The particular email address ceased being used (by me) over a year ago, 
but suddenly 4 weeks ago I was "subscribed" to their mailing list.  
Apparently the common theme is that we all registered for the VON 
conference at one point.  Apparently they think it is OK to take an 
address that was used to register for VON several years ago and now, 
suddenly, and without MY PERMISSION "subscribe" me to a marketing spam 
list on a different topic.

RSK wrote:
> 3. But it's utterly pointless to obfuscate addresses in such archives:
> spammers have long since set up quite efficient methods of harvesting
> any address used on any public mailng list or Usenet newsgroup. [1]  The
> only people meaningfully impeded by these futile attempts at obfuscation
> are legitimate senders.

Rich, I know that spammers can get an address by subscribing and 
scarfing the emails that are used to post to the list.  I just don't 
want to see it be made any easier for them by idiots making their own 
public web archives (when this list already has a web archive) and then 
not obfuscating the email addresses.  As you and others have also noted, 
that's just plain rude.

To tie in with another thread, those of you who don't see anything wrong 
with another network using someone's ASN in a way that triggered alerts 
to their network admins, and without permission (and causing said admin 
to miss part of a very important family event while he tracked down the 
source of the alert he received) probably didn't see anything wrong with 
the first unsolicited commercial email either.  I mean, it's just one 
email, what's the harm.... you can just hit delete, right?  I really 
can't understand why all of you are saying it's no big deal!

jc