I was not phishing

M3's logo stands for engagement.

M3’s logo stands for engagement.

Some of you were concerned yesterday over an email you got from me entitled “Unsubscribed from The M3 Blog”. It was not a hoax.

Since I already know some of the people who were legitimately subscribed did not receive the email, the contents were:

If you are getting this message, it is a miracle! This will be the last one from this subscription service because it was sold to someone who is more interested in harvesting information than handling outgoing mail.

To that end, I am canning this plug in the moment I hit send. On M3, you will find a button to resubscribe, if you so desire. Otherwise, you are unsubscribed as of this email. 🙁

See you at M3

In fact, I was, as I always am, true to my word. When I pressed send, I deleted the plugin and all of its data, which included your email addresses. The Office is clear, I do not collect email addresses or personal information for any purpose because if you are interested in buying something from me, you will proceed at your leisure to a website which carries my goods.

The only email addresses I have are the ones which are held in the SIB’s email address book (hosted by Google) which captures all addresses *I* have ever sent email. Again, unless I have contacted you, I do not have your email address. Additionally, if you would like me to add you to the subscription list, you will still get an email which asks you if some bot put your email address into the box in some scam attempt. Ignoring that email is just as good as never having put the email in in the first place.

Why, oh why?

During my hiatus, more than 3,500 bots registered for M3. The first day I posted, more than 8,000 emails went out simulanteously notifying people I had posted. This got me on the spankies list for Google (my email handler), who does not like people to send that much email when they normally only send around 1,100 organic emails and 3,400 subscription emails per day.

I could have recovered from this with a little trimming of the bots and a pointed (read screaming) email to the developer of the subscription software. There was something more nefarious under foot.

Also during my absence, two mass attacks were made to the developer. His software was compromised, and an attacker was able to reverse engineer his software. This sort of thing happens everyday with OpenSource software. It is the entire point of having software which is for the benefit of mankind.

The bad guy used the reverse engineered software to harvest the addresses of the users of the software and to spam with our (read my) email address. Fortunately, Google shut down the proxy mail which I was obviously not sending; however, they kept me on the spankies list for the massive amounts of email going through M3’s proxy as a result of the huge number of fake emails registered at M3.

Now What?

scaleI decided to serve up a bit of justice. The fake registrations were not the problem of my software developer. They are a loophole created by WordPress to allow people to come to sites built with WP software and bypass the email subscription services owners have chosen. WP says it is to protect their clientele. In fact, it is a way to hoard email addresses.

Since I am not collecting email addresses in the first place, I do not care who has the email addresses. Yesterday, I sharpened my horns and hooves and gave WordPress exactly what they wanted. Subscription now goes through them. They are party to the 2,800 emails I have yet to delete. (My carpal tunnel quit after I deleted the first 2,500… 20 at a time.) They are also party to the 60 new ones since 1800 last night and the routine 80+ I get per day.

spamSadly, more than 85% of those registrations are junk. Most are dead emails from spammers looking to make some gibberish comment with a link to a knock off site or some such other nefarious place M3 would never associate. Now that I am posting again, the spam is picking back up, which is good news for the Friday Follies. It may well make a return after its long hiatus.

Up to You!

So, if you are up for sticking with M3 after all these years, drop your email in that annoying little box to the left and when the email comes to the box you indicated, press the confirm button. I hear tell you can make it tell you once a week or day or never when posts go live. The days of me posting three times a day are long gone, so you will not have to worry about me spamming you as I once did.

Red Signature


If you could punish a spammer, what would you do?

PS Go look at the fractals from yesterday!!

Hashtags: #spam #whohatesspammers

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© Red Dwyer 2014
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26 Comments

  1. She shows up beautifully in my blog reader – Bloglines, tho I think they are under a slightly different owner now, but I’ve got the same log in there I had years ago. Love it. And I don’t think her controls show up at the top b/c as I understand this – this would be a WordPress hosted site, not a WordPress free site, like I’ve got. But that’s my mediocre understanding of things. (this is all in response to gigoid, really, more than anything. altho I wanted to comment on the blog reading stuff. I love Bloglines, shuffle thru it once or twice a day….in mosaic you can do that real quick, and just use the right arrow to open what you really want to read.)
    Allison recently posted..Posts coming soon.My Profile

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  2. You can count me in of course, after all I wouldn’t want to miss anything from M3 it’s all too damn good to miss 😉

    Off to collect my email notification next, I hope it worked and if it did there should be twenty subscribers next, and counting 🙂

    Andro xxxx

    Reply
  3. Hi Red, long time I know..
    I am so sorry to hear all the trouble you have had.. and what ever happened with the email sending.. this was the First that showed up in my email box for a while.. but I was not on my PC to acknowledge it…
    You also showed up in my reader now too for the first time 🙂 So I am here and wish to still subscribe..
    Sending you Love…
    Sue
    Sue Dreamwalker recently posted..A Matter of Opinion~ Judgement & TrustMy Profile

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    • If it came to your reader, you likely have an email to go alongside. You are subscribed in that case 🙂 One of the downsides of the system is I cannot see who my subscribers are. :/ So very glad to see you <3 Much love, xxx

      Reply

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