It has come to my attention that someone has spammed thousands of random people (not necessarily subscribers) using our email address as their “reply to address”. This essentially means that you’d open the email, see our “tips” address and naturally believe that we had something to do with the email and assume the content was trustworthy.
Since they entered our address as the “reply to”, to date I have received 3,338 notices from all of the firewall/spam devices out there saying, “Sorry, spam is not allowed”. In cases where the message slipped through those defenses, I have also received several “Out of Office emails”, etc. This leads me to believe that a lot of these messages did actually get to people.
The spam that I’ve seen contains varied messages. Basically, we’re looking at anything from banking schemes to invitations to install spyware. In some cases, we were the “Reply To” and the “Sender” was a random address from Wachovia Bank.
Know this:
- We have never and will never share any email addresses with anyone.
- For those of you that have subscribed to our email feed/update, you should not click on any links contained in emails that do not contain our unsubscribe message in the footer. This service is completely managed by Feedburner (now owned by Google) and the template has not changed. In these emails, you will see my logo and most importantly, you will always see that unsubscribe footer.
- I only email people that email me – I get a ton of emails from readers and I respond when I can. To date, I have never sent any unsolicited emails to any readers. If you get an email from Dumb Little Man and you didn’t instigate the conversation, that should be a HUGE red flag.
I have contacted Google about this because all of the Dumb Little Man email addresses use Gmail as the brain. To date, I have not received a response. I am actually not sure what else I can do .. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know in the comments or through the “Contact Us” link on the top of all of our pages.
Thanks,
Mark