Spamgourmet statistics

I’ve been using Spamgourmet for several years, and I just now thought I’d check and see who’s been attempting to spam me the most.

1. bigfoot.com, with 7712 messages since April 2006. I signed up for this service when I was in middle school, with their promise of a ‘lifetime forwarding e-mail address’ that would ‘never expire’. Unfortunately the web bubble burst and they apparently changed hands, some years later adding the caveat that they would use your precious address to spam you for the entirety of that lifetime. I gave everyone I knew new addresses to use, but I still held onto the bigfoot.com one, just in case there was someone who still had my old address and really wanted to send me the most important e-mail of my life. But finally I couldn’t take it any more, and I either was unable to satisfiably cancel my account, or simply didn’t trust them to stop spamming me if I did - so I assigned a somewhat profanity-laden address at spamgourmet.com to forward to. I see they’ve been making good use of it.
2. phpclasses.org, with 1214 messages since August 2004. I guess I’ve used them once or twice for minor code snippets. I seem to recall they looked sketchy.
3. macupdate.com, with 998 messages since July 2006. I signed up for a free trial, not realising that it was only a trial and that they were going to ask me to pay for it thereafter. Looks like they’re still asking.
4. Free iPod Pyramid Scheme, with 422 messages since July 2004. Hey, don’t give me that look, I bet you tried this too back when it was all the rage. I’m actually surprised there wasn’t more spam than this, since they actually admitted up-front that that was what they were going to do.
5. versiontracker.com, with 364 messages since September 2006. Probably about the same story as macupdate. Rather embarrassing that I apparently fell for the same thing twice, but thanks to spamgourmet, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Runners-up, with between 50 and 100 messages: Bausche & Lomb (from a ReNu product recall form I filled out, apparently), Lineage (MMORPG that had a free trial I think), AOL Instant Messenger (various accounts), and Stuffit Expander (Mac archive utility that used to not suck, oh, maybe 10 years ago, and now they require an e-mail address just to download it).

Disclaimer: as Spamgourmet has deleted these messages before I saw them, there’s no way to know whether it was actually spam or not, and for all I know they might have had valid ‘unsubscribe’ links. But as I never indicated to these companies that I wanted to receive e-mail from them, and specifically indicated (where possible) that I did not, it’s as good as spam as far as I’m concerned.

2Prong disposable e-mail

2Prong disposable e-mail

Replaces Mailinator as the easiest and fastest disposable e-mail service I’ve seen. The bookmarklet is a nice touch.

For more advanced spamproof mail, I still use Spamgourmet.

todays non sequitur scotty is usually a veiled

Today’s Non Sequitur. ‘Scotty’ is usually a veiled reference to Scott Kurtz, author of webcomic PvP. At least, it was last time.

Let’s see how we can interpret this. Uh, Kurtz’s comics will never appeal to mainstream because he uses too much internet/gamer-related culture? Except it would be kind of silly for Wiley to single out Kurtz for this, if indeed that’s what he’s doing, because PvP is known in the land of webcomics more than anything else for being generic sitcom humour. It would make a lot more sense for Wiley to use this strip against, say, Penny Arcade. But then, Penny Arcade wouldn’t care; they might even fire back scathingly at Wiley. The most Kurtz is likely to do is get all uppity and offended in a blog post.

Or maybe I’m imagining all this and ‘Scotty’ was just a random name chosen.

ichc

ICHC

Square Enix merchandise store (just opened)

Square Enix merchandise store (just opened)

Oooh!

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The Daily Show making fun of themselves - how they usually use green-screens to pretend they have a reporter on location. This week, they actually do.

M33 unofficial PSP firmware will intentionally 'brick' the system if it thinks you've visited a web site they don't like

M33 unofficial PSP firmware will intentionally ‘brick’ the system if it thinks you’ve visited a web site they don’t like

Bad news. Avoid.

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Last night, on a very mysterious Colbert Report…

Here’s a Google News link if you hadn’t heard. It’s not actually all that big a deal, but I’m very amused with his presentation.

Skype is down today.

Skype is down today.

I use Skype as my sole landline… I guess you get what you pay for.

iPhoto '08 keywords

iPhoto ‘08 keywords

I didn’t notice this at first, as it’s sort of hidden away in the menus. Looks very useful, at least for people who have lots and lots of photos (which is probably not me).