Today’s fun spam subject line:
Database containing a list of every registered domain and email in the world for sale!
The message goes on to brag about how they have every .com and .net domain in a big list (generated with their special “whois extraction software”) and of course some 600 million e-mail addresses. Whee!
1) It’s illegal to extract information from the Whois database for marketing purposes.
2) It’s illegal to run repeated, automated queries against the Whois database at all.
3) The 600 million e-mail addresses are undoubtably generated by adding common names to the domain suffix, such as “info@domain.com”, “webmaster@domain.com”, “jeff@domain.com”, and so on. In all likelihood, a huge majority of them are going to be invalid… not that spammers really care.
4) The message comes from someone named Mike Luthan, whose e-mail address is roy.durrands@telinco.co.uk, and who tells me in the message to write to him at sales@bulkemailmarketing.org. Hmm, I wonder if Mike is his real name?
Argh. The whole spam thing is so idiotic, and so wasteful of time and bandwidth. One wonders if these guys really think they’re doing the rest of the world a service peddling their wares. In the end, I suppose the people who we should really blame are the scores of morons who actually buy the stuff… without them, the business model would collapse. But when one of every hundred thousand spam recipients buys the product, the other ninety-nine thousand of us have to suffer.