JJ emailed me this morning to ask me not to delete a possible mail in my personal email box. Thankfully I read his mail before deleting my spam (these days I only get a handful anyway thanks to all the filters). He pointed me at Beatnik's journal and The Register, as to why.
It appears someone has discovered a large resource for email addresses for Perl developers; CPAN. So they have quite happily reaped all the addresses and sent UCE to them all. Now for those not in the UK, there may be nothing you can do beyond delete the thing and set up filters. However, The Register article highlights a court action that was taken by someone who was the recipient to a similar email. He won.
Seeing as there are a few people from MessageLabs on CPAN now, this could prove interesting. Sending UCE to anyone is bad enough, sending it to those who work in the Anti-Spam industry is asking for trouble. I'm not sure where this will go, but I don't think they'll be getting the kind of response they were hoping for.
UPDATE: Thanks to the feedback from Smylers, the agent in question, has apologise for their actions. It's a shame that agents don't think carefully about their actions. Once upon a time it wouldn't have caused a stir, but then that was so long ago, I'm not even sure that agents were online back then!
-Dom
Re: So I wasn't the only one...
Smylers on 2006-02-07T18:14:33
I had to read it a few times to see whether or not it was genuine. Mostly, my shock was that it came through bogofilter unmolested.Why did that shock you? Or to put it another way round, what aspects of spam messages did that e-mail have such that you'd expect it to be classified as spam?
It also got through SpamAssassin with a score of 0.0. But I can't see anything in it which would trigger a rule: the content is as you would expect for a job recommendation from somebody who knows you; the headers are all genuine, cos it is from who it says it's from; and even sending to everybody on Cpan is sufficiently well targetted that it isn't going to meet thresholds of high volume mail across the internet as a whole.
Also, it wasn't specifically trying to invade detection: there isn't anything in it which looks like it was just put there to get round spam filters.
Smylers
Re: So I wasn't the only one...
Dom2 on 2006-02-07T20:02:49
Mostly just because it was unexpected. Bogofilter is so effective at stopping mail that finding new non-spam mail to my CPAN address is a big surprise. The only mail I get there is PAUSE upload reports...
Apologies to anybody who received this e-mail and was irritated by doing so. It was sent by an external recruiter we're currently using for a vacancy.
We've explained to him that this sort of thing is not welcomed and is likely to be counter-productive; he now understands this, sends his apologies, and won't be doing it any more.
Obviously this isn't as good as if the mail hadn't been sent, but after the event it's the best we can think of. Sorry, again.
Smylers
Re:
Aristotle on 2006-02-07T19:05:23
You should probably post this in your journal and in the Perl News section at PerlMonks. A comment somewhere on a use Perl journal is just not visible enough.
