[support] Support Ticket Opened Spam?

[Ursula Pieper]

I complained to abuse at blackmesh.com, and got the following reply (pasted
below). The medispend.com people could inspect the email headers, and
complain to the hosting company of the originating email sender. I emailed
blackmesh.com and support at medispend.com and asked for the full headers of
one of the spam emails.
I know that this is probably futile, but sometimes, I just need to try to
stop these people.

Ursula

>From blackmesh.com:
This phenomenon is due to a spammer somewhere sending spam to
support at medispend.com, and using your address as the "From" address.  Since
support at medispend.com is a helpdesk, it helpfully replies with
ticket-tracking information you can use to follow your request.  As you
know, of course, "your" request is not *yours*, so this reply just looks
like spam to you.

Unfortunately, due to the way that Internet email works, there's not a
whole lot that can be done by either you or by medispend.com to stop this
sort of bounceback spam.  You can read more about the problem at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_%28e-mail%29 .  We have
strengthened the spam filters on medispend.com to try to protect against
this sort of attack, but we cannot unconditionally guarantee that you won't
receive further emails if the spammers elect to use your address in future
attacks.  If you don't have any reason to interact with medispend.com, we'd
recommend setting up a filter to automatically delete any messages from
medispend.com (though we'd request that you don't additionally mark them as
spam, as they are not, per se).

We want to extend our apologies to you for the emails you've received, but
hopefully it's now more clear why you received them, and you can appreciate
that we were not complicit in your receipt of them.  If you have any
further questions, however, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification.

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Earnie Boyd
<earnie at users.sourceforge.net>wrote:

> Jeff Brown wrote:
> > On 16 Nov 2011, at 7:25 PM, Marty Landman wrote:
> >
> >> At 11:44 AM 11/16/2011, Ms. Nancy Wichmann wrote:
> >>> I got 448. The system owner has apologized. Let's stop now, as this
> >>> is becoming spam itself.
> >>
> >> I agree. There ought'a be a special corollary to Godwin's Law to
> >> cover just these types of situations. Like the Law of Meta-Spamming
> >> or something. Just thinking out loud here.
> >
> >
> > Oh, the irony. ;)
> >
> > I just got a personal email from pinky.goyal22 at gmail.com:
> >
> > "Sincere apologies for my error that caused automated emails to be sent
> > to you from the address pinky at evakoss.com. I was working on a support
> > ticket system for a client and when testing the system I didn't realize
> > that the system would send a support ticket in response to your email
> > I've received and responded to in the past.
> >
> > I'm very sorry and will take extreme caution so this issue never occurs
> > again."
> >
> > But I've never communicated with this person in my life.
> >
> > I'm really battling to imagine an entirely innocent use-case scenario
> > for scraping mailing list archives for email addresses and names.
>
> As I stated before pinky was not the sender of the email.  Sure it was
> the From address but that can be faked.  Check the email headers for the
> real sender and you'll find "millen at iade122lmp01.blackmesh.com" was the
> sender and not pinky.
>
> --
> Earnie
> -- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd/
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
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