Thursday 15 September 2005

Oh dear: false positives ahoy!

So the good people behind Mailinator (the disposable email address folks) decided to put up a Google Maps thingy that shows where spam has come from recently. Unfortunately, it only served to illustrate the false positive problem...

Tags: , , .

6 comments:

GoodBytes said...

Richi, how do you know that there are false positives? I mean, how can one tell?

Richi Jennings said...

OK, so I didn't give much detail. Basically, Mailinator's map was saying that Apple is a spammer. "New Music Tuesday" is a legitimate email newsletter that one has to sign up for.

GoodBytes said...

Thanks for the explanation. Well, I guess they treated that specific mail as spam because it was probably sent to many recipients.

Anyway, I love the Mailinator's idea - putting the spammers on the map! Thumbs up.

B Pipa said...

goodbytes got it right. It was sent to too mnay recipients so it was labelled as "bad" in our system. Our system is all about self-preservation and surviving the DOS attacks.

Brian
(the mailinator developer that did the map)
http://myvogonpoetry.com

Richi Jennings said...

Come again? Apple is launching a denial of service attack on Mailinator? Sounds unlikely. More likely is people signed up for a legitimate newsletter with a one-shot email address. Hardly fair on Apple.

Word to the wise: if you want to download iTunes, you don't have to give any email address.

IdleThreats said...

For what it's worth, I've tried no less than three times to unsubscribe from that very newsletter, and each time, they've told me I was removed.

For some reason, I'm still getting it. It's [illegal] spam as far as I'm concerned.

Post a Comment