Blogspam.

So, I don’t know what the deal is, but TechCentralStation spams me. They probably think it’s just a newsletter, but when I get 357-line blasts of HTML in my mailbox from people I’ve never heard of, it’s spam.

Until recently, I though they were generic spammers. I never read any of the crap they sent me; it’s just spam, who reads that? I just set up a ‘bot to forward spam complaints to their provider and ignored them. A couple of days ago, my mom mentioned something about an article “on tech central station”. I said “oh, I know them, they’re spammers”. She was surprised, so I went and looked. Sure enough; the ones spamming me are the ones with the web site about free markets and technology.

I assume they just have a really, incredibly, badly-run newsletter. What I don’t understand is how anyone claiming to know anything about technology could be stupid enough to send HTML mail. No MIME headers, just blocks of HTML garbage.

Here’s what it looks like:

&lt;html&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
&lt;title&gt;TCS Newsletter&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"&gt;
&lt;link href="http://www.techcentralstation.com/tcs-indexstylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"&gt;
&lt;style type="text/css"&gt;
  &lt;!--
  a  {
        text-decoration : none;
   }
  a:hover  {
        color : #ff8600;

  }
--&gt;

That’s garbage. And, since I never asked for it, it’s spam.

I’ve emailed them.

I’ve called them.

I’m still getting the spam. I still haven’t heard back. It’s sort of depressing; when things like this pass for “clueful”, I’d hate to see what we’d look down on. I can’t think of any plausible reason for a non-spammer to have ignored email sent a week ago. Anyone who wants to pretend to be a technology pundit had damn well better respond to email in under a week.

Anyway, if anyone out there has a contact at TCS, I’d love to know where the fuck they got the idea that they had permission to send me mail, ‘cuz I never gave them any such permission. I’d also like to know whether they realize how stupid HTML mail looks .

Comments [archived]

From: Felara
Date: 2003-09-17 10:44:58 -0500

Isn’t it wonderful to be confronted with stupid people everywhere we go?

BTW, Hello! :)

From: Robin Munn
Date: 2003-09-17 14:50:39 -0500

I’ve been receiving the TechCentral spam^H^H^H^H"newsletter" for a while now myself. Probably something to do with my E-mail address being the contact for a website, or maybe my participation on comp.* newsgroups. Bah.

Good luck trying to get ’em to stop. Me, I haven’t even tried (based on how many spammers take “Please stop” E-mails as confirmation that the E-mail address is valid). I’ve simply relegated them to the spam-killer list, a.k.a. my spambayes database.

Someday when the junk fax law is extended to include E-mail, things will change.

2003/09/17

Comments [archived]