I just got an email today with this title of “bartender”. It was a piece of mortgage spam. Now, since I have mentioned that I am a bartender on your, and the Something Awful forums only, and that it would otherwise be a bizarre thing to have as a spam headline, I assume that someone is scanning your forum for spam purposes.
Just a heads-up. Keep up the great work.
Love Muad’Dib
I have received a spam (419er) that had to have been sent by someone with access to the board.
My email address here is a disposable one from www.sneakemail.com and it’s highly implausible that anyone could guess it.
I’ve just checked my board preferences and discovered that Vcard download is enabled by default, so it’s possible someone got my address that way.
I don’t remember seeing this option on the old board software, so I’m assuming it’s a new feature.
This option should not be enabled by default, nor should the ‘enable other members to send you email’ option. (IMO of course)
Spams do indeed have bizarre headlines. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a “bartender” spam, but I have gotten a great deal of spams with subject lines irrelevant to either myself or to the actual content of the spam.
Trying to customize spams based on users’ posts on a message board would be exceedingly difficult. They could scan for words you commonly use in your posts, I suppose, or pick words at random from your posts, but there are probably many words you use more often than “bartender”. And it would take some awfully sophisticated AI to recognize that you had said that you are a bartender (considering that there are a great many ways to phrase that statement, and that the same software would have to be scanning for a great many other keywords).
Now, that said, it is possible that spammers are scanning the boards for e-mail addresses, although vBulletin tries to make it as hard as possible for them. If you have your e-mail address set to be hidden from view, they can’t do this, but unfortunately, that also means that other members of the board can’t e-mail you easily, either. It’s up to you.
I got spam yesterday with the subject line homotopy and I had one recently that was flypaper. Both are really quite work-related and quite unusual. Neither, however, seemed aware that I didn’t live in the US.
I think I’ve received the odd bartender, selling foreign mortgages too. I don’t have my address public here.
Muad’Dib,
Echoing on what Chronos said, it’s probably just a coincidence. Of course, anything’s possible.
It may very well be coincindence. Lots of “bizarre” subjects are popping up in spam. One common technique to sneak past ISP-level spam filters is to dump a dictionary into the spam program, which then pulls random word combinations as the subject line. The idea is that such as subject line won’t trigger any of the spam filter’s subject keywords. Which explains why I got a spam with the title of “juvenile deuterium” or some such.
Not that this has anything to do with the conversation, but sneakmail looks pretty cool. Does it work well with web-based email, or just Outlook? I ask because I use what’s probably the most primitive web based email I’ve seen (plus side, extremely little spam).
Oh, they seem to have a description on their web site about how it works. Silly me.
I think it’s excellent; I use it for every website/mailing list I use. Makes it trivially easy to see who’s selling my address to spammers, and it adds an extra layer of privacy to places like this.
The weakest bit of the service is the web interface, all those drop down menus confuse me but YMMV.