quietlife.net

dailykos

11 Oct 2005

The comment I just sent to DailyKos:

Hi guys.

I have been a dailykos subscriber for a long time.

When I registered, I gave the e-mail address [email protected].

(my mailserver gives you the ability to append a “postfix” to the username, so the -dailykos bit is just a way I can track that particular address.)

The bad news is that I just got spam tonight to my [email protected] address.

This is pretty unfortunate. Did you sell my address to a spammer?

–Chris

UPDATE: As noted in the comments below, it seems that at worst, some e-mail addresses may be public when they shouldn’t be, or something. Spammers are simply trawling the user profiles for public e-mail addresses. DailyKos is not, I repeat not selling e-mail adresses. Not selling e-mail addresses. Sorry, I am just a little gunshy after the last time I posted about people referrer/comment spamming with johnkerry.com and the next thing you know there was a flurry of blog telephone game. “What? people are spamming johnkerry.com?” “johnkerry.com spams?!” “John Kerry, Spammer!!” “John Kerry personally spams millions while eating delicious live puppies!!!” and so on.

Comments

Smarry — October 12, 2005 at 05:28 · reply

If you’re not getting spam to cwage@, that’s pretty damning, yeah. Otherwise some enterprising jerk may be just appending -dailykos to addresses in hopes of getting some that work and/or padding whatever list they’re selling.

To be absotively sure, you can make it [email protected], or some other random number. If you get spam to that…

Ravenwood — October 12, 2005 at 13:33 · reply

I don’t read Kos, but I checked it out and they appear to have user profile pages for registered users. Picking a few random user profile pages, you can see that they publish the email address on the page:

http://www.dailykos.com/use…

A spambot probably saw the page and harvested the address.

That is why Ravenwood’s Universe does not publish ANY email addresses. When my commenters leave their email address it is stored in the database but NEVER published to any of the web pages.

cwage — October 12, 2005 at 13:35 · reply

Good eye, and mystery solved:

http://www.dailykos.com/use… has my e-mail right there.

cwage — October 12, 2005 at 13:45 · reply

So in my profile there’s a spot for a “public e-mail address”, but I never put it there.. Perhaps it was just a flawed assumption that it automatically puts the address you register with into the public e-mail address for your profile, or maybe this functionality was introduced later and they just migrated old accounts right into the public profile.

Who knows.. spammers are definitely trawling their site for addresses, though.

Thanks! Your comment has been submitted and will appear shortly.

Leave a comment