DPS and Spam Emails
This is just a short note to let recipients of emails that are said to be coming from Digital Photography School that they have not in fact come from this site.
DPS has a free weekly email newsletter that is sent to subscribers who opt in to receive it.
Today someone who is not connected with DPS in any way sent our latest email on to their own email list with embedded ads down the bottom of the email.
You can tell if you got this email by the subject line – ‘W8 Loss It’s Amazing‘. The ads seem to be for weight loss products.
This email looks like it was sent by us – but in fact it was not. We apologize if you received it and can understand if you are upset by it (I am upset too) – but unfortunately a spammer is using our legitimate email to disguise his or her ads.
I am looking into this situation but wanted to publicly explain the situation before getting back to our core business of helping our community improve their digital photography technique.
12 Responses to “DPS and Spam Emails” - Add Yours
March 9th, 2007 at 11:20 am
But yet my interest was piqued….. in your newsletter/site.
The scavenger hunt is interesting.
I may return…
March 9th, 2007 at 11:27 am
This is the first time I’m glad I received a spam. As I am interested in photography I never questioned the source of the spam e-mail. I had never heard of your web site before and after clicking on a couple of the links in the spam they actually did connect me to your web site. I just signed up for your “real” newsletter.
Thank you.
March 9th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
thanks for your understanding and welcome to DPS. Hopefully some good will come out of this. Unfortunately I’ve had many hundreds of emails today from people who were anything but understanding – although I do totally understand their frustration.
March 9th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
You handled yourself very well and you’ve won a new reader simply by the way you post this and in the way that you responded to my angry email today complaining about the that was sent in your name.
The good thing that came of this is that after spending 3 hours surfing through your site and the forums you’ve proved to me that you’re a decent guy and you’ve found yourself a new reader.
Sorry for reacting so badly to you, I was angry when I got the spam but now I’m actually glad (in a round about way) that I did.
March 9th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Wow. Welcome to the new members/readers. Be sure to check out the forums!
Though it sucks that someone soiled the good name that you (Darren) has been so good at building, I guess that old saying still holds some truth that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.”
Again, welcome to the new readers and introduce yourself over at the forums. There’s always something to learn and something to share.
March 9th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
I was wondering about it too. “W8 loss” did not seem to be a kind of subject you would usually write for a digital photography email. I got the same email earlier and thought it was spam, and saw it was from your e-mail [spoofed, of course] and read the entire thing to see if you used weight loss as an example somewhere.
I then decided to come back to it later in the day. Thanks for explaining this. Keep up the good work!
March 10th, 2007 at 2:31 am
I’m familiar with your family of blogs, but am not a newsletter subscriber, so was surprised to see the spam show up in my mailbox, and also knew right off that it wasn’t you. It seems to be having the unintended consequence of sending you a lot of traffic and winning you some new readers, so I guess there’s a silver lining.
March 10th, 2007 at 2:42 am
No biggy, at least it was only one.
March 10th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Seems to me that if they included your message in a spam, you should go after them for copyright infringement. If you can find them, that is.
March 11th, 2007 at 7:08 am
I get spam emails every day but I’ve never actually opened one and abused the person that sent it. Haven’t these people heard of the delete option?
Seems like a lot of people overreacted.
March 13th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Junk mails usually make me mad. But for the first time, i am happy i got this email in my junk. I subscribed to your newsletter and hope to learn the neat tips and tricks you have here. Thanks for the good work! and thanks to the spammer that got me here
-ari
http://shutterhappy.blogspot.com
March 15th, 2007 at 4:40 am
I used to chase down SPAM sources, but since my domain catch-all account receives about 1000 a day (on a good day), it hasn’t been practical for some time. I’ve owned a domain since the early 90s, and for many years it was publically listed with InterNIC (now Domain Solutions, the buggers), so every spammer out there has my domain in their junk email lists, ripe for ‘alphabet’ attacks.
I’m now hosted by a hosting company that cloaks my domain record’s contact and billing addresses, but the damage has alredy been done. Instead, I use my domain hosting provider’s effective SPAM filtering to sort the suspect incoming email into a junk mail folder. I scan over the email subjects (organizing them by subject tends to group similar/same subjects together, making it much faster to skim), and then purge the folder. Very occasionally, I get false positives (real mail in the bulk folder) and false negatives (SPAM in my inbox), but by marking them appropriately, the SPAM filter ‘learns’ and gets increasingly smarter.
Another thing I do, though, is generate a unique address (at my domain) for every different site I’m requested to give email information for, e.g. amazon@my-domain.com, digital-photography-school@my-domain.com, etc. I have no limit to the number of unique email addresses I can generate for my domain, and the all go to my catch-all email account, and when downloaded, I can easily sort them into dozens of different folders, making it easy for me to check for mail from various sources, and keep them organized.
That way, if they ever do sell or disclose my address to 3rd parties, I know exactly where the email address came from. I’ve only had two entities break my trust in the past, and in both of those cases, I did go to the trouble to let them know what I thought of them. The emails subsequently stopped.
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