[Novalug] Spam or Worse?

[Mark Smith]

i think those emails are part of spam broadcasts.  they use valid
return addresses in their spams and sometimes that has unexpected
side-affects.  if they spam an account creation system with you as
a return address things like this can happen.

on the other hand, it could be a poke to see if your email address
is valid.  they think that if you see "free" that'll you'll hit the
web page thus validating your email address... this can also happen
if you display external graphics in an html message.

ymmv, but i don't think there's any danger to you.

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 08:20:27AM -0800, Mike Mellor wrote:
> I've been getting a lot of e-mail from a web site that I never visited.  It
> started out with a "Welcome to X" e-mail.  Since then, I have gotten almost
> daily messages from that site saying that credit has been added to my
> account, then "corresponding" e-mails from a credit site (which has the same
> host) saying that "credit has been approved", or sometimes that the credit
> didn't go through.  I've checked all of my credit cards, and nothing is
> happening there.  Today I got a response to an e-mail that supposedly came
> from my account (not my name).  As far as I can tell, the site only has my
> address, no personal information (the name they list is not my name).  So,
> I've been  tagging it as spam in GMail and ignoring it.
> 
> So, after all of that, the questions are:
> Is this just some elaborate spam?
> Could my e-mail account be compromised?
> Should I contact the site (I have never replied to any message)?
> Should I prepare to abandon this e-mail account?

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-- 
Mark Smith
mark at winksmith.com
mark at tux.org