Spam

The New Beth Perry?

Just got this at my gmail account:

Hello,

I was browsing through the results from a search engine when I came across your site. It has a lot of good information and I was hoping that we could exchange links. Doing so would not only help our regular visitors find other useful pages, but it would also make our sites rank higher in search engines like Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. Exchanging links would be free and beneficial for both of our sites.

The site has links at the top of every NBA team page including the Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs giving you access to local clients.

My web page is over 4 years old and receives more than 2,000 visitors a day. I try to offer the best information available on any topic I think my visitors would appreciate.

If you’d like to exchange links for our mutual benefit, I’d be happy to discuss it with you over email.

Sincerely,
Jeremy
Just NBA Players
2215 West Lindsey
Suite 102
Norman, Ok 73071
4053212922 (please no phone calls)

What website of the half dozen I am responsible for? None are remotely connected to sports. I went to the link in the email, which I haven’t posted here for obvious reasons, there is no place to trade links. The return email is not from the same domain either. So what is this one all about? Another email address harvest? Hoping to get a higher Google ranking because the Gmen are secretly indexing all the mail sent through Gmail?

I’ve Got Gmail!

Thanks to Rick at Obsession I have now arrived fashionably late to the current web status party. So email me if you want at brian.the.red@gmail.com. Go ahead, spammers too, I need to see if this thing works for me. I have been an Outlook Express user for years and have grown quite used to it, so I don’t know if I can make the transition to web-based email. Right now I know I can’t because there is no way to import my long list of names in my OE address book into Gmail’s contact list.

Heard From Beth Perry Lately?

This morning in my inbox I received this little ditty:

From: Beth Perry [mailto:beth@bethperry.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2004 09:16 PM
To: [Brian_the_Red @ barndoorfanclub.org]
Subject: barndoorfanclub.org ranked # 14 in Google for extenze ron jeremy

I’m a web master, and I was just searching Google for extenze ron jeremy. I found your domain, barndoorfanclub.org ranked 14, which is pretty cool.

My site is all about Health – Men, too . Maybe we should link up? I wouldn’t be stealing any of your sales, because all I do is write informational articles…not selling anything on my site at all. And most of my visitors write back to say that they love the fact that I only write good, quality info. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a pretty loyal following of people that come back over and over again (they use the site as a reference), so if you link to me, you should get some pretty good traffic from it — which is always nice.

Anyway, let me know if you’d like to swap links. I’ve already linked to you, and will keep it up there for a few days until I hear back. Hope to hear from you soon!

Beth Perry
RAC IM: 1175455.

I actually did rant once about Ron Jeremy and Extenze so it is conceivable that I might show up on Google when searching for that combination of words. There wasn’t any clickable link to Beth’s site, so I typed in www.bethperry.com and got a “Page Cannot Be Displayed” error. Hmmm. Type in the URL in Google and get 3 options, 1) web pages similar to – nothing, 2) web pages linked to – nothing and webpages that contain the term – one hit, a fellow blogger with the same experience, just different search terms.

Curious, I type in extenze ron jeremy in the Google search window and there is my site, not at 14, but on the 3rd page about #27. Because I have been in a playful spam mood this week, I decided to write back to Beth:

From: “Brian Bogardus” [brian_the_red @ barndoorfanclub.org]
To: [beth @ bethperry.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 07:53 AM
Subject: RE: barndoorfanclub.org ranked # 14 in Google for extenze ron jeremy

Dear Beth,

I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to unlink me from your page. I just checked my Google ranking for the search term extenze ron jeremy and I have fallen back from your reported #14 to a disappointing third page listing of #27. I can only assume your recent linking to my site caused this. Having invested an awful lot of time and money to increase my Google ranking I am very upset. If the link to my site is not removed from your site forthwith I will be forced to take legal action.

Sincerely,
Brian the Red

I haven’t gotten the email bounced back by now, so I’m betting that someone or thing got it. After I had a good laugh with my co-workers by reading Beth’s letter and my response, I got to thinking just what might this be about. It isn’t like comment spam where the intent is to spread the google ranking seeds of crabby internet scum sites hither and yon. The only thing I can figure is my little bit of fun played right into her hands. By replying I confirmed that they had a valid email address that they could then resell.

Anybody else heard from Beth Perry lately?

Bye-Bye Bigfoot

Way back since whenever I’ve had a bigfoot.com email address. It was a thing of beauty whilst ISP hopping in the beginnings of the internet revolution. It was free and I could forward and distribute and all kinds of other helpful stuff. Over the last decade bigfoot?s free services have dwindled, a victim of their own success. For about a year or so now I have been limited to 25 pieces of email a day. Trouble with that is, with the increase in spam a person had to be lucky to be in the top 25 to get a message to me. I stopped using the address, but kept checking for old times sake. Today I terminated my account. The end of an era.

While following the steps to end my association with bigfoot, not once, but twice I had to click OK on a screen that warned: “By terminating your Bigfoot For Life account, you will no longer receive offers from Bigfoot’s Promotional partners. However, you will also have to forego the benefits of using any of Bigfoot’s services which are available only to those with active Bigfoot for Life accounts.” Did they ever think that maybe it was those promotional partners junk mail that made the service unusable?

Quick Updates…

…in lieu of actual original thought post content.

I screwed the pooch when I made up the voting page for the Water Photo Contest. When I got the three last minute entries I copied and pasted the info from the then last photo. I changed the title, but neglected to change the number assigned each photo, oops. If anyone voted for any of the last 4 photos all the votes went to one. So when I got home from work I reset everything. If you voted yesterday or early today your chad got swept into the bit bucket, go vote again.

Cable guy comes Wednesday after work to hook up my cable internet.

No comment spam as of yet (not unusual though.)

Printed out the labels for the SAD CD, thank you Microsoft Clip Gallery Online. Goes in the mail tomorrow.

To buy said labels I had to go to Staples, just 5 days after swearing I’d never go back after last Wednesday’s incident. Not that I didn’t try to avoid it, I went to Wal-Mart looking first and I absolutely hate Wal-Mart.

Bring It On

This morning I got another couple of comment spams, one for here at the Rant and one for the Diaries. I immediately deleted them and rebuilt both weblogs. I haven’t been getting too many spam comments, but these were the ones that broke the camel’s back. Tonight I installed MT-Blacklist, a Movable Type plugin billed to eradicate comment and trackback spam. There are two paths for installation, The Ridiculously Easy Path and The Less Easy Path, I of course had to take the less easy path because my webhost didn’t have a particular pearl module installed. The less easy became The Kinda Hard Path as I couldn’t seem to get the path I had to change in the Blacklist.pl file right. On what was to be my last stab at the path, it worked. wOOt.

So bring it on, Mr. Purveyor of Porn, Ms. Dealer of Discount Drugs, Mr. Make My Male Member Massive, I’m ready.