I had never gotten one of those emails until about two weeks ago. Got perhaps 10 in a few days. (I don’t get much spam)
And, for the last weeks, they’re gone as quickly as they came. Mysterious.
A very long time. I’m starting the 2nd year of my MA program now!
Apologies for the hijack. I’ll be happy to send everybody e-cards to make it up to you, though 
I just received one from a ‘mate’.
“The moon is full and the breeding time is upon us. Let us prepare a nest of twigs and moss for our offspring.”
Like pepperlandgirl I stupidly followed the link but was warned before entering the site. The first one I received was on 4th July from “a mate” so thought it was legit as I still have one US friend who sends me e-cards. Mine have all been from a class-mate, school-mate or just mate and I get several a day.
I fell for the first one but even as I did it thought, usually they specify who sent it?? I scanned the machine afterwards to make sure it didn’t do anything Bad.
Ok I’ll raise my virtual hand and say I’ve been getting them too. So if we see a cross section of all of these emails across North America and Europe, there must be someone out there with a helluva list or bot that is sending millions of these.
How will it stop?
I was lucky. I’ve got the job of cleaning out our company’s spam filter and checking for legitimate e-mails which got caught by mistake. Right before these started hitting, my local newspaper had an article on them. I sent out a notice to our users that any e-mail like that would be deleted unread and explained why. I was particularly amused by the one which came from a “worshipper” and asked the fellow it was sent to what he’d done to acquire one.
What amazes me is the number of lonely women who want to date the men and women at my company!
I work in an Internet-related field and I must admit, this is a very clever way to spread your viruses and ads.
Except, when we got the very first ones (a few weeks ago - I have a LOT of public email addresses for work so we get a LOT of spam) they were from senders like “chance.hk” and “suri.hk” which made it very obvious that they weren’t real.
A few days later it seems like someone at Spam Central was like “oh shit! No one is going to believe they got a legitimate email from Hong Kong! We have to change the FROM name…” and they started sending with names like “hallmark.com,” “ecards.com” and “americangreetings.com.”
Interesting to see how this stuff “evolves.” It’s extremely clever and I wouldn’t be surprised if this round of spam caused a lot more problems than usual.
I’ve started getting these recently as well. The first one was from “a relative,” and since my sister occasionally sends me e-cards I came close to clicking it. Then I recalled that all the previous ones actually had had her name on it, and deleted it.
Since then I have received quite a few from “relatives”, “classmates”, and “neighbors.” No “worshippers” yet, alas.
I count 29 of these in my “deleted mail” file, beginning on June 22. The first several were from Hong Kong. The first non-Hong Kong mailing was from “postcards.com” on June 28. They may be tailing off, with only one since July 15. I’ve had to add rules marking anything with “greeting”, “postcard”, or “ecard” in the subject line for automatic delete.