Spammers in Denial - UK Food Exports
While George is really the anti-spam expert around here, there is one amusing spam trend I've noticed recently. For instance, today I received some spam from UK Food Exports (no, I'm not going to link to them, spammers don't deserve a free SEO boost), who appear to be (you guessed it) a UK-based exporter of food items.
Read on for the details.
It's run-of-the-mill spam, but the disclaimer at the end of the message caught my eye - for one, it was almost as long as the message itself.
This message is not "SPAM" because it contains our identification and unsubscribe instructions. This message was offered to you for one of the following reasons: your email address has been selected from a database that you have subscribed, your email address was made public by you; you have requested to receive the offer; you are a partner of our company; your email address is in our database as a result of previous correspondence.This is, of course, completely incorrect - the message is 100% pure spam. The disclaimer is absurd for several reasons.
1) Among most IT professionals & server administrators, there is a slightly more formal term for spam: unsolicited commercial EMail, abbreviated as UCE - many also amend or revise that definition with the word "bulk". These spammers, however, appear to be borrowing a definition from the appropriately-named CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 - a largely useless piece of legislation in the United States that allows most spam so long as there's an opt-out link and a valid From address.
There's also the minor detail that CAN-SPAM doesn't apply to either the country where this spam was sent (the United Kingdom) or the country where it was received (Canada).
2) If you feel the need to state that your EMail isn't spam, then it almost certainly is spam. The fact that it's from a food export company makes it particularly silly - do they also feel the need to label their physical products with disclaimers saying saying "this is not SPAM®"?
3) The disclaimer (quoted above) gives several possible reasons why we received message - in this case, the 3rd reason ("email address was made public by you") is technically correct. There's a little more to it, though: the address that they spammed has only been "made public" in the sense that it's hidden in the source code of a contact page. And the sole reason the address exists? As bait for spammers.
In other words, the only way that UK Food Exports could have obtained the address is if they viewed the source code of the contact page, or used a type of computer program known as an "EMail harvesting bot" (software that searches websites in order to collect EMail addresses). That, or they purchased an EMail list from a 3rd party who had harvested the address.
So congratulations UK Food Exports, you are a spammer.
