Every day, I wake up to bluebirds twittering outside my window, throw up the curtains to wash my face in buttery sunshine and sing a little song to myself, confident that this will be the last day that I can enjoy another one of life’s little rights to privacy.
Antispam Spammer Gets Spammed Out of Business
By 5.19.06
We pretty much knew this was going to end in tears when we first heard of antispam company Blue Security’s scheme to start spamming spammers. The idea was technically sound: market a software that automatically floods addresses associated with spammers with millions of emails, shutting down their servers and spam capabilities.
Email Users Incompetent At Spying Out Scams
By 5.16.06
We saw this great post indicating exactly how clueless the average person is when trying to detect spam of phishing schemes in their in-box. The blogger launched a site called SpamorHam.org to see how savvy Internet users were across the board when trying to detect email fraud. Unfortunately, users of the site are failing the test in overwhelming rates.
Mobile With a Capital T And That Spells Trouble
By 5.4.06
My T-Mobile horror story is actually related to our business account. I work for a relatively small telecom company (we don’t do wireless) and for about a year my job here was to dispute any errors in billing with our vendors (sad that that’s a full time job).
AOL Denies Censoring DearAOL
By 4.17.06
AOL has predictably denied blocking emails that mentioned DearAOL.com. Instead, they have described it under the handy bugbear of being a “software glitch” that affected “over 50 sites with no commonality.” A list of the sites affected was not released, so, you know, we’ll just have to take their word for it.
Amazon.com Predicts NCAA Win
By 4.3.06
Jeff Bezos knows something about tonight’s NCAA basketball championship game the rest of us don’t.
Spitzer Sues FreeiPods.com, Spinners of Spam Dreams
By 3.24.06
You already knew all those WinAFreeIpod.coms were scams. Now the People’s Champion, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, knows and he’s suing one of the companies behind it, Gratis Internet.
Must Bookmark: Google IP Maps
By 3.13.06
You may have always heard how you can geographically pinpoint where an email came from using IP address but now GeoTool makes it possible for the layman.
Famous but Stupid Psychiatrist Loses $1.3 Million in Nigerian Email Scams
By 3.2.06
Diagnosis: chronic greed. The latest dupe in the Nigerian email scams may be a renowned psychiatrist from UC Irvine who frittered at least $1.3 million of his family’s fortune in payments to internet con artists.
Earthlink’s Incompetent Email Tech Support Frustrates Felix
By 2.22.06
Felix Salmon, a stalwart NYC blogger (check ’em out here) and all-around good chap, sends in his little chat with Earthlink about how his emails gets delayed for sometimes up to two days. The succession of tech reps he talks to are equally mystified, but instead of owning up or trying to resolve the issue, dump buckets of useless red herrings on his head. One of them even quits mid-session after not being able to provide an answer cribbed from the tech support binder propped open in front of him. Full juicy transcript, interlaced with Felix’s commentary after the jump.
Yahoo and AOL to Charge Companies To Spam You
By 2.6.06
As if you didn’t already get enough Spam, AOL and Yahoo are going to start charing companies to allow them to bypass your spam filter:
ISP Wins $11bn Lawsuit Against Spammer
By 1.5.06
tips@consumerist.com gets a lot of email. A small percentage of it is made up of much coveted submissions from you, our beloved readers. We adore these. They allow us to get paid without the drudgery of actually having to find exciting new Consumerist “scoops” ourselves. So thanks for that, guys. Unfortunately, the much larger percentage of our email comes from Eastern European girls we have never met making presumptuous statements about our potency or – worse yet – phallic circumference. Spammers or friends of ex-girlfriends, in other words. But usually spammers.
Shophackery: Filter Online Shopping Email with Gmail
By 12.22.05
Here’s a cool bit of shophackery: If you append a descriptor to the end of your Gmail name—say, consumerist+shopping@gmail.com, instead of consumerist@gmail.com—you can then add a filter to Gmail to catch all those emails. That allows you to filter out your potentially spammy online shopping mail using the same account.
