The Story of "Nadine"

Guinnessy writes: "We've all accidentally typed in a wrong email address sooner or later. But can it all go horribly wrong? On http://www.spamresource.com there is the story of Nadine, an account of what happened after an Internet user accidentally gave a wrong email address when she visited a web page and signed up for a sweepstakes. Live in fear...."

I hate spam, but ...

[smoondog]

Perhaps I'm confused (or maybe it is because I got bored and only read 10 of the many links on that page), BUT, I don't find the story of Nadine all that unique or interesting. I get piles of spam everyday and I haven't opted-in to anything. My most spammed address gets over 100 messages a day.

In my experience, trying to follow up or research these spammers is generally a useless waste of time. Bounce them, sue them or further change the law. Doing more is just going to frustrate yourself, IMO. Remember when you call around and get put on hold and follow the paper/isp trail you are wasting a lot more of your time than theirs.

-Sean

Re: The point of the Nadine story

[gorbachev]

The real point of the Nadine story is demonstrating how spammers are reselling and distributing spam lists.

Some of the spammers hitting Nadine's Email address are trying to act as responsible members of the bulk emailing industry, while at the same time blatantly violating online privacy policies (their own, and their list suppliers') left and right.

The point of the story is to point out how effective "industry self regulation" really is.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers

Misdirected spam, etc

[crawdaddy]

Years ago, I registered the email account crawdaddy*AT*hotmail*DOT*com. Since then, several other "crawdaddy" accounts have been opened on hotmail. Many of these people forget to tell their friends/services they're signing up with that there is a number that follows their name, ie. [e-mail]. I have gotten several misdirected emails, including personal invitations to join someone on a trip, details of someone's personal life, two very detailed accounts of someone's sexual exploits, and one highly suspicious email that indicated something very illegal and fraudulent was going on somewhere and that the "crawdaddy" that should have received it is involved somehow. Of course, I also get exponentially more spam on this account that I do on any other account that myself or my friends have had for the same period of time. I now check my inbox twice a day just to clean out spam so that my hotmail account isn't temporarily disabled because it's reached its limit!

So many trash addresses

[blindbat]

Make you wonder just how many *millions* of trash email addresses and fake names are in many databases that collect info from web forms.

How often does a person enter false info because one *has* to to download, proceed, etc.

Re:I hate spam, but ...

[mcc]

This is important *because* it is so common.

It is a good general view of something that happens every day, all over. It is a good forensic analysis of what can happen from just *one instance* of submitting an e-mail address to a single sweepstakes site.

It may not have helped most of the people on slashdot right now to have read this, but i think this is a good, well-written article to give to someone who doesn't read slashdot, doesn't know any sysadmins, doesn't have to deal with spam, doesn't incessantly read web message board posts by sysadmins who have to deal with spam, and doesn't know the extent to which this stuff goes on.

More importantly, it is a good article to show businesses who are considering using spam to advertise.

If you read all the way through the nadine chronicles (a good part of the middle could probably stand to have a "you can just skip this part" disclaimer, really..), the end is actually targeted directly at businesses considering advertising with spam, telling them why they should not and why their money will most likely be wasted if they give it to a bulk-email-advertising firm.

Just because you and i know (or think we know) everything there is to know about spam doesn't mean that everyone in the entire world does. And this is one of these issues where the people who are most important to reach are the ones who are currently uninformed..

Re:Prevention measures

[Anonymous Coward]

many companies have found that people somehow get confused or lost somewhere in the process and don't make it through the double opt-in.

You mean, the companies have noticed that they aren't getting a 100% throughput, and assume that it's down to 'people getting confused', rather than the method working precisely as planned?

Fake Email Addresses

[P!erCer]

Whenever I am asked for an email address from an non-reputable site, I simply give a fake one such as [e-mail]. My friends do the same thing, except they always do [e-mail]. I know a lot of people who do that. Hotmail must be swamped with invalid emails... Also, I bet some of the "fake" addresses turn out to be real and some poor people start getting spam they don't deserve. "Accidently" type the wrong address...ha!

The funniest thing about this story was...

[Kamel Jockey]

I really hope that the author of the article implied sarcasm when he was "not worried" that the spam sender had a "privacy policy" registered with that TrustE or whoever the authority of the week happens to be. I can't believe people actually believe any site's privacy policy. Sure it says all the BS about how they won't sell your info, but of course it also says they can change it at their discretion, which is how they get around it. Call it the "Darth Vader" rule of contracts.

This reminds of a friend of mine who was outraged that her supposedly private email address (which she only gave to 3 friends and never posted it online anywhere) received spam. I told her it must have been her ISP that sold her email address to a spammer, if none of her friends indeed didn't give it out. She told me it couldn't have been them because it was "illegal" for the ISP to do that. Of course its "illegal"... doesn't mean they won't do it though!

IMHO, no privacy policy is worth the paper on which it is written (which is true because most are not printed out). No matter what any site's policy says, it is safe to assume that they can and will sell all of your personal information to the highest bidder (along with everyone else). We need to stop being naive enough to believe that companies actually care about our privacy. As long as its profitable for companies to sell information, it will always happen.

I hope I didn't come off as a troll, but this cynical view is based on many years of experience dealing with online and offline vendors. None of them has ever respected my privacy, and none ever will. But knowing this, I can adjust my buying habits to ensure my privacy isn't compromised too badly.

Re:Fake Email Addresses

[rgmoore]

If that's the case, you should use a known invalid address. Just use something like nobody@127.0.0.1, which is guaranteed not to go to anyone who doesn't deserve it. ISTR that there are even some reserved names that are guaranteed not to work, and I seriously doubt that most software actually checks for address validity before letting you proceed. Or you could always use something like postmaster@theirname, so they wind up bombarding themselves with spam if they try to use it.