on saturday, i was present when a post to freecycle south king county arrived, with an offer of a tunturi recumbent bike. naturally, i replied instantaneously, but i got no response. two days later, i replied again, but no response. two days later, i replied a third time, but again, no response.

there has been no “taken” message posted to freecycleskc, so i decided to do a bit of sleuthing, and discovered that the person who posted the message has only posted one message, started their account shortly before posting that message, is not currently online, and hasn’t been online since saturday. to me, this is an indication that the post offering the recumbent bike is a ruse to get people who will be sent spam the “chance” to respond, so that the spammer will have their email addresses, which, then, will be added to spam lists that are circulated among other spammers.

i wrote the list owner for freecycleskc, a person with the charming email handle “PrayingMommy4”, who isn’t concerned, because the person “gave very good answers when they applied for membership a few days ago”, but i’m not convinced. to me, this has all the earmarks of a spam harvester, in fact it may be an automated process… 8/

a few days ago, i got a google alert for my name, which was a link to a spammer’s discussion group, where they were discussing this “opt in” list that had my email address, and other email addresses from spamcop.net on it, and the spammers were wondering whether or not this was “really” an “opt in” list or not. the conclusion of the discussion is that it was “really” an “opt in” list, but they recommended that they “not use” the spamcop.net addresses.

by the way, it’s off topic, but are there any speakers of what i assume is turkish out there, who can tell me what this is all about?

i have NEVER signed up for any “targeted” lists with my spamcop.net address, so any list that includes my spamcop.net address is, by definition, going to be reported as spam. automated processes and clueless list owners don’t make this any easier, but i’m going to keep reporting spam until i stop getting spam.

imagine a day where 100% of ALL EMAIL TRAFFIC ON INTERNET are legitimate messages, and not a single UCE of any kind… it’s possible, you know…