I was trying to snag an interesting bargain at HomeDepot that I found on slickdeals.net so I registered with their site, figuring if it knew my local area it might better find available stock for me. I declined to receive any of their 8 mailings and figured that was that.

I get a registration confirmation that is kind of scary

Steve, this confirmation email verifies your recent registration at homedepot.com. You will not receive additional email from The Home Depot unless you opt-in for our email offerings or purchase at homedepot.com.

[various other content in the welcome email snipped]

You may be removed from this list by calling 1-800-430-3376, or mailing your request to Customer Care at:

The Home Depot
2455 Paces Ferry Rd NW
Atlanta, GA 30339

So it’s confusing, for one. Why do I need to be removed from this list if I won’t receive anything else anyway? And why will they presume to add me to this (or some other) list when I make a purchase? Forcing me to write or call someone to opt-out? That’s heinous. Definitely makes me rethink my purchase, if I am therefore forced to make a call to opt-out.

Got a sp&m email today that was simply this picture. Whoah.

I blogged previously about trouble commenting on BusinessWeek blogs. Turns out that my ISP (which is SBC) has been blacklisted for some nefarious activity. Trying to submit a comment redirects me to a horrible page

DSBL: Listing Data
If you’re not sure why you were referred to this webpage, please read this page first.

Status

IP: 68.127.18.86
State: Listed
Listed in unconfirmed (unconfirmed.dsbl.org): yes
Listed in singlehop (list.dsbl.org): yes
Listed in multihop (multihop.dsbl.org): no
Record last changed: 2004/Oct/29 05:03:49 UTC
Reverse DNS identifies server as: adsl-68-127-18-86.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net

History

2004/Oct/29 05:03:27 UTC Listed in Unconfirmed (view message)
2004/Oct/29 05:03:27 UTC Listed in Singlehop (view message)
2005/Oct/11 15:05:52 UTC Removal Confirmation Sent EMail address: postmaster@pacbell.net
Requestor IP: 68.127.18.86
Message Report:
207.115.57.16 accepted message.
Remote host said: 250 2.0.0 j9BF4f7

and of course, it’s up to someone at the ridiculous monolith at SBC to fix this. Yeah, like that’ll happen.

I guess I won’t be joining in on the BusinessWeek blog dialog anytime soon!

I received this spam today

From: roydymond@hotmail.com
To: steve@
Subject: Announcing GIANT SQUID world event survey

Hi

Spirit Quest is a collection of professionals who can succeed in surveying the Giant Squid for the very first time alive and in its own natural habitat.

During surveys other unknown creatures and undiscovered artifacts are likely to be found. This will be seen worldwide on sattelite tv.

I seek now museums and supporting parties to join in sponsorship and other ways for this very important set of expeditions.

The advanced subsea vehicles are designed and tested, ready in storage for final fittings and installation.

I propose the procurement of two 24m sailing ships as each expedition is a duration of 7 months at sea without coming to port. Together these vessels will operate silently 24/7 in all weathers and the subsea vehicles will launch to the great depths required. Both ships will be broadcasting live to the internet as well as documenting evidence for later broadcast.

I look forward to your positive involvement and association with this world class event.

All the best

Roy Dymond MD Principle Spirit Quest

Media Partners www.reverieproductions.com

I had previously blogged about how a kind soul at AOL saw my frustrations with ending the torrent of antiSpam messages. Today, another kind soul wrote me. They had seen the complaint, they had investigated on their own and thought that things were worked out, but wanted to check back with me.

I’m so pleased when this happens; I imagine for one of these two folks, if not both, handling this problem when I contacted them through official channels fell within the scope of their job, and I don’t understand why it wasn’t solvable that way, but again I must salute the proactive surfers who are contacting people on their own and troubleshooting outside the system.

I have previously blogged about my troubles with AOL sending me THOUSANDS of bounce messages intended for my ISP’s admin folk, and how they would not take me off their list despite my calling and emailing and following all their rules, etc.

I guess that blog got noticed by someone at AOL AntiSpam Operations who wrote me directly and offered to help. He told me that he’s taken me off the distribution list for the bounces (and I believe that’s correct) and apologized for my frustration. It’s terrible when the normal channels break down but it’s great there are proactive individuals out there who obviously care about how their systems are running and how they are impacting people and are willing to reach out and solve a problem.

Thanks to the individual who took time and care to resolve this, and boo to AOL for not having a proper infrastructure to allow their staff to take care of these things in the normal course of their work.

Back when I was a kid I liked the idea that you could fill out a form in a magazine etc. and have mail sent to whatever name you gave – they would pretty much use anything. I signed up to get philatelic announcements sent to Worklkg Glapiztorknyo, Grand Poo-bah. I got that for years. Years after I had moved out of my mom’s house, they were still coming. Hi-larious.

My roommates and I (well, it was mostly me) during the undergrad years, used to play little jokes on each other by coming up with clever names (now that we were more mature). We had
Dr. Enest Q. Schliepenfelder-Jones
Flaughean O’Penulean-Jones
James T. Picasso-Jones
Christopolis Vertinsky, and beyond.

We cracked ourselves up pretty majorly.

Flash to many years later when spammers are using whatever tricks they can to get past filters. One of them is coming up with sender names that are composed of other words or phrases:

Unmannerly O. Tester
Unconsidered M. Rutherford
Motherfucking K. Regulation
Juliette J. Chlorinates
Infections F. Paeans
Impends R. Joel
Featureless C. Mortimer
Disunity P. Qingdao
Disqualifies U. Helios
Debt D. Gable
Boltzmann E. Schoolchildren
Birthmark L. Cather
Biblical K. Chat
Winnipeg H. Chatterbox

Amusing similarity in weirdness. I may have missed my calling.

I run a few mailing lists, the most active being Undercover, a Rolling Stones discussion group that goes back to 1992. In this era of spam and spam counter-measures, there are lots of problems in getting email through (I had a client, for example, that couldn’t get email from me at all; fortunately they were able to figure that out and not assume I was just ignoring them!). A discussion group that can generate dozens of messages in a short period of time is easily flagged by automated software as a spambot of some sort.

Say what you want about the discussions on Undercover, they aren’t spam. But they were getting flagged as spam (we didn’t know that; we just started seeing hours and hours of delays, sometimes messages being held for 20 hours before being delivered), as our ISP suggested (it is hard to track down email problems – is it between the sender and the mailing list host, or the mailing host and the sender? Or elsewhere)?

The ISP suggested I whitelist Undercover – go through some administrivia to get AOL to recognize it is a valid sender so that it wouldn’t get auto-flagged as spam. I filled out a bunch of forms, including agreeing to have certain types of bounce messages sent back to me. I didn’t follow all of it; it was speaking a language best understood by someone that operates an ISP and has access to the email software that UNIX etc. systems are using. I’m just a customer with a web-interface, I’m not a sys-admin. So I signed up and was approved.

The email delays (to AOL, at least) stopped.

The bounce messages started coming. TONS and TONS. And what I realized was that I had signed up as the whitelist contact for the entire ISP. Not just www.under-cover.net and the Undercover email, but anyone who is hosted at my ISP that sends something to AOL – I was the guy they were going to let know about it. In fact what I think is happening that anytime there is spam sent from anyone at my ISP, every single AOL customer who flags it as spam in their account, well that comes back to me.

You can’t believe how much of this I received.

I asked my ISP. No answer – I was starting to realize that I had taken on the whitelist responsibility that THEY should have, for the entire ISP.

Finally after months and several thousand messages, I contacted AOL. I emailed them – they have a lot of info on their support pages for people at other sites trying to email or run approved lists, etc. They always want you to email them at postmaster@aol.com. No response. No response. Finally I called and got right through. No problem, they told me, your ISP should be the whitelist contact definitely not you. Email us and say X, y, and Z, and they’ll take you off within 24 to 72 hours.

I’ve emailed them 5 times over a month, and it’s not working. I’m still getting these messages.

What has happened is that my ISP has finally (after numerous requests from me) fixed whatever was enabling one single user to be the source for all this spam. It was obvious – you could see on every single bounce message from AOL what user was causing the problem. It was all from the same customer of the ISP. So plugging that hole did reduce drastically the number of warnings I was getting.

Until today – someone else is spamming AOL customers and every one of them is flagging it as spam and every one of those is coming back to me. In a four hour period I have received 453 of these messages and as I type this, more are coming in.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Seriously, I don’t know what to do. AOL won’t take me off the list – when I email they ignore me and when I phone they tell me to email. It’s not really bothering anyone at my ISP and they won’t take any action. And this has been going on for months now.

I [hate] AOL. I also [hate] my ISP (meanwhile it’s almost time to renew my hosting account there for portigal.com)

Update: 6 hours later it’s now more than 3000 messages that have been bounced back to me

Update: I’m sure it totally more than 4000 messages. My ISP claims that they have signed on as the whitelist contact for AOL, and I finally discover (with their suggestion) that I can filter unwanted emails directly at the ISP so they don’t come through – yeah, they are still being sent by AOL but they won’t ever be delivered to me.

This one really surprises me – I thought AAA was (among other things) an advocacy group for consumers, at least related to road and car and travel issues. I guess that doesn’t preclude them from being spamming scum as well? Seems out of their brand image to me. Maybe someone acting locally doesn’t have to be accountable to the corporate parental unit?

(click on pic to enlarge)
Here’s an interesting one – spam that uses the Amazon look to lend an air of legitimacy. I hadn’t seen this before.