Spamhuntress

I scolded a friend a few weeks ago. He’d given sms.ac the password to his address book, and I received an invitation at my (previously unknown to sms.ac) gmail account.

He told me he’d unsubscribed straight away, and I told him he needed to let his entire addressbook know. I told him we’d see. If they’d cleaned up their act, I shouldn’t get any more invitations from him about sms.ac.

Today I found another inviation in my spam folder.

If he was straight with me, he’s unsubscribed, yet they continue sending invitations in his name. Not good…

And yeah, I call that spam!

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Update: I just cornered him now. He says he got as far as giving them his password for the addressbook. He was a bit tired. But you have to answer an e-mail they send out in order to confirm your subscription. He never did that, and says he’s not a member because of that. Never having tried that service, I don’t know if it works that way. I’ll see if I can figure it out.

Ah, looks like the process was convoluted enough, he thought he was unsubscribed, though in reality he was “non-activated”.

And he’d blocked them from his computer, so anything else they sent him, he wouldn’t get. Quite into geek stuff, this guy.

But now he’s unsubscribed for real, and managed to do it without activating his membership.

But problem is, a lot of people might think they’re not really members, yet their friends are getting spammed. And continue getting spammed, by this service.

The part that requires activation, is the phone part of the service, he tells me now. And the way I’ve seen it told before, that gets expensive really fast. And that’s what stopped him. He’d been tired and signed up, kept going through the process, until he saw the stuff about the cell phone.

But he still told me, straight up until our conversation right now, that he’d gotten out right away. So, it’s confusing. He believed the confirmation mail was for his membership, and that not answering it meant he was unsubscribing. We’re so used to double opt-in, I’m sure he thought that’s what it was. But he was actually subscribed, even though he never answered their mail.

Now we’ll see if the mails keep coming to me or not. Because now he really IS unsubscribed.

Second update: Gmail considers the sms.ac invitations as spam. But how about going one further? What if Yahoo and Hotmail blocked their bot from accessing the accounts of all these people who unwittingly sign up? I mean, that’s logical, right? Just find their IP addresses, and block the whole shebang!

Third update:
Interesting post, where one guy claims to have received invitations to himself from himself, about joinging the network. Considering he never joined, that’s kind of interesting. That part is in the comments to the post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 8:33 am and is filed under Mail spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.