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My dpreview-only email address was just spammed!

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Prognathous

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Too bad "Keep my email address private" was not set. Don't you think this is the kind of setting that should be on by default?

Here are the whois details of the spammer:

Domain: alldigitalservice.com
Status: Active

DNS:
ns1.thaiserver4u.net
ns2.thaiserver4u.net

Created: 2005-05-18
Expires: 2006-05-17
Last Modified: 2005-05-18 10:21:20

Registrant Contact:
alldigitalservice
Sirion Aramwit ([email protected])
88/5 Ramkhamhaeng 21 Yak 15
Bangkok, , th
P: +669.8112552 F:

Administrative Contact:
none
Sirion Aramwit ([email protected])
88/5 Ramkhamhaeng 21 Yak 15
bangkok, , th
P: +669.8112552 F:

Technical Contact:
none
sirion aramwit ([email protected])
88/5 Ramkhamhaeng 21 Yak 15
bangkok, , th
P: +669.8112552 F:

Billing Contact:
none
sirion aramwit ([email protected])
88/5 Ramkhamhaeng 21 Yak 15
bangkok, , th
P: +669.8112552 F:

May his address be harvested by his kind,

Prog.
 
That's terrible!
It's quite an effort to extract email addresses from the forum.
First
You have to logged in.
Then you have to do it manually before you get the address.
I don't really get to much bother from having my email public

Ian

Go Preston

--

 
The spammer only has to log one of those once to harvest thousands of valid email addresses. Yeah, that's some effort...

BTW, it's ok that you don't mind your email address falling in the hands of spammers. It's also ok for you to not mind getting spam. I and most people I know do, so let's move on from the "not an issue" mini-discussion, ok?

Prog.
 
Prognathous said:
The spammer only has to log one of those once to harvest thousands
of valid email addresses. Yeah, that's some effort...

BTW, it's ok that you don't mind your email address falling in the
hands of spammers. It's also ok for you to not mind getting spam. I
and most people I know do, so let's move on from the "not an issue"
mini-discussion, ok?

Prog.
Click to expand...
I agree,but not as harshely,lol!
 
Actually it is not that easy.

just because you get logged in does not mean that you can start harvesting. I'm guessing Phil has bots in place to detect harvesting. It would not be hard to make it so that a logged in user can only check so many email addresses in a given amount of time and when this is exceeded, the account is put on hold.
Prognathous said:
The spammer only has to log one of those once to harvest thousands
of valid email addresses. Yeah, that's some effort...

BTW, it's ok that you don't mind your email address falling in the
hands of spammers. It's also ok for you to not mind getting spam. I
and most people I know do, so let's move on from the "not an issue"
mini-discussion, ok?

Prog.
Click to expand...
--
Brian
 
Brian said:
just because you get logged in does not mean that you can start
harvesting. I'm guessing Phil has bots in place to detect
harvesting. It would not be hard to make it so that a logged in
user can only check so many email addresses in a given amount of
time and when this is exceeded, the account is put on hold.
Prognathous said:
The spammer only has to log one of those once to harvest thousands
of valid email addresses. Yeah, that's some effort...

BTW, it's ok that you don't mind your email address falling in the
hands of spammers. It's also ok for you to not mind getting spam. I
and most people I know do, so let's move on from the "not an issue"
mini-discussion, ok?

Prog.
Click to expand...
--
Brian
Click to expand...
That's good to know,because I kept mine private,and I wouldn't want to feel like that can happen to me.What can actually happen when someone gets hold of your email address? Just curious.
 
Prognathous said:
Too bad "Keep my email address private" was not set. Don't you
think this is the kind of setting that should be on by default?
Click to expand...
Either you mind or you don't mind. Since you mind, you should have set it the way you wanted it. Why go to the effort to create a unique address, apparently to track "problems" and then leave yourself vulnerable to those problems.
 
This is why my address that i give publicly is yahoo mail since they do a very good job sorting the spam from the non spam, gmail is getting better but i still dont feel satisfied they are up to par with yahoo as far as spam blocking goes..
 
But do you actually know that such a mechanism is implemented here?

Prog.
 
Which is exactly how this "industry" works. There are lists of email addresses being sold for hundreds of dollars. I don't want my address to end on one of those lists, because once it does, it only gets worse.

Prog.
ladyk said:
What can actually happen when someone gets hold of your email
address? Just curious.
Click to expand...
 
Craig Gillette said:
Either you mind or you don't mind.
Click to expand...
Most people do mind and the default setting should reflect that.
Craig Gillette said:
Why go to the effort to create a
unique address, apparently to track "problems" and then leave
yourself vulnerable to those problems.
Click to expand...
There's no effort whatsoever. It's subdomain-based, so I just make it up as I type and as long as the formatting is correct, it's valid. If I had to register at craig-gillette.com I would have used something like [email protected]. No need register this address, since I'm already registered as [email protected] and mydomain.tld supports subdomains - got it?

Prog.
 
We have a lot of features in place to stop harvesters and I don't believe there are any automatic harvesters which have run against this site for at least the last two years. The only way spammers can get your email address from here is if (a) you don't have the 'keep private' flag set and someone manually copies your email address, (b) your email provider has revealed your email address in one way or another or (c) the spammer has simply 'guessed' your email address (this happens a lot).
Prognathous said:
The spammer only has to log one of those once to harvest thousands
of valid email addresses. Yeah, that's some effort...

BTW, it's ok that you don't mind your email address falling in the
hands of spammers. It's also ok for you to not mind getting spam. I
and most people I know do, so let's move on from the "not an issue"
mini-discussion, ok?

Prog.
Click to expand...
--
Phil Askey
Editor / Owner, dpreview.com
 
Phil Askey said:
We have a lot of features in place to stop harvesters and I don't
believe there are any automatic harvesters which have run against
this site for at least the last two years. The only way spammers
can get your email address from here is if (a) you don't have the
'keep private' flag set and someone manually copies your email
address, (b) your email provider has revealed your email address in
one way or another or (c) the spammer has simply 'guessed' your
email address (this happens a lot).
Click to expand...
Well Phil, I haven't had any and my email address is there for all to see. Perhaps my lads breaking a few arms and legs here and there keeps them away, but more likely my privacy utilities. Re the perpetrator, may his elephant defecate on his dhoti.
Skipper494.
 
Mine has, so far, not had any spam. Another I use that appeared in someone's website 'guestbook' gets loads - so many in fact that I'm thinking of cancelling it.
 
Prognathous said:
Too bad "Keep my email address private" was not set. Don't you
think this is the kind of setting that should be on by default?
Click to expand...
It's unfortuante, but probably not a result of someone harvesting dpReview. That would be quite a bit of work, you'd have to create an account, then write an HTML aware program that could look at threads, get dpReview user names, view each user name's profile, do a "send email" and wait for the redirect to your email program, a process taking several seconds per email harvested. And if any one user requests more thana certain "safety threshold" number of email addresses per hour, I'm sure all sorts of alarms go off at dpReview headquarters.

Now, if any dpReview user has ever sent you an email, then your email address is sitting there, in a piece of mail in their "sent mail" folder. And, if they're software dumb enough to add everyone they've ever sent emial to, to their address book, then all the email adresses are all together in one easy to harvest place.

So, if any spam sending or harvesting virus has ever hit anyone who's ever sent you email...

--

Salvage troll posts! When you see a thread started by a troll, post something useful to it. It will drive the trolls up the wall. ;)

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com
 
It wasn't too much trouble to do up special email addresses, isn't too much trouble to take the camera out of automatic, but it's Phil's fault you didn't check a box and got spammed.

Yeah. Right.
 
This is what I use everywhere. For 10 months I never received spam from this site. And because I use spam motel, I know exactly which forum is spamming me. DPReview is NOT.

Alex.
 
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