Just got my first Blitz-related spam

Today i got my first spam addressed to the email address I have registered for blitz... at least i think it is the first.

So either someone on this site knows about my tiny tadger and was trying to be helpful... or some harvesting has been going on !!!

Anyone else experienced this ?

[edit]
... actually, it occurs to me that this could be one of those viral emails that reads your address books and then mails out (silently) to everyone in there. I have only ever had email from a very small number f fellow-blitzers... if you are one of them you might want to run a virus check on your system !!

And this is the only place you've ever let anyone see your email address? No friends have it? Nothing?

edited above...

I usually create a unique email for each site I register on. So this one has '_blitz' appended before my domain name.

It could well be a viral, yeah.

Hey, don't blame me! :)

I was just echoing what I was told. That's my excuse, anyways. :P

You can't view emails without signing into the site - you need to buy a blitz product and sign up to see emails.

Therefore it is harvesting or a viral email.

Yep, you gotta be logged in and own a blitz product to see people profiles. Your email address is also safe when in your sig as people not logged in or without accounts can't see peoples sigs.

Sorry to hijak this thread but is Outlook safe or should I look to using something else for emails?

An email address is safe anywhere on this site provided you have never done anything silly like write myname AT someplace DOT com. A proper email address (myname@...) is censored to anyone not logged into the site. And you can't log in without registering a product.

ROFLMAO, no its not. Its not even remotely safe. Any Blitzer registered on the forums has access to it and can grab it for spam lists.

This hasn't popped up in a while, but it was a major issue a few years ago in the community, along with people having their sites "messed" with by fellow Blitzers.

>This hasn't popped up in a while, but it was a major issue
>a few years ago in the community, along with people having
>their sites "messed" with by fellow Blitzers.

Ofcourse it wasn't nice, but I always thought that whoever put those BLITZ 3D commercials up on darkbasic.com was pretty clever.


Andy

Of course, we are assuming that the all-powerful Google and/or MSNbot haven't managed to harvest a cache of a profile page.

I get so much spam that I have considered changing my e-mail address' ..

TBH though I have an awsome spam filter in the form of thunderbird, and I never really notice any of it, unless its a new form of spam that my profile isnt aware of.

@Andy - did you take a screenshot of that? I'd really like to see those! :D

People submit your emails to spam lists or put them in the open where they can be harvested if they dont like you. Maybe thats what happened?

I may be daft, but are all so sure that there is the slightest protection on this site? If I copy and paste the link to my profile page into IE (knowing that I use Firefox everyday, not IE, so there isn't the slightest cookie for this site) the page loads, I am *not* logged in, and I see perfectly my email address.
Can anyone explain to me what you mean by protection?

Better still was the reaction (this is re the Blitz ads at DB). It was when TGC first introduced Google ads to their site and that caused an uproar in itself, a few days later the Google ads started showing an advert for Blitz - and the userbase went wild.

TGC on the other hand just ceded that Google ads where indeed very well targetted, so you have to hand it to them.

Koriolis, you can copy/paste it but you cant find out what it actually is if youre not logged in.

So the protection you talk about is just not knowing upfront the exact url of the user prorepties page? That didn't prevent google to index these pages you know.
Just type "site:blitzbasic.com showuser" in google and see by yourself.

Not that I pretend to know for sure how they did it. These urls were probably posted somwhere. And who knows, other bots could even infer *all* the urls from that (a simple heuristic is to see the url contains a parameter whih is simple number, and try new ones).


Well such a "protection" is just fine for me, I just understood from previous posts that email adresses were supposed to be masked when not logged in (namely because of Toby's post who talked about censored adresses. Bad, bad Toby :) )

You are right, I was 100% wrong, I read this and took it t mean that they weren't outright lying:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Account/email_info.php



Which is an outright lie.

Hmm, so should we spam BRL about this?

I started getting spam recently myself. Lots of it, all of the same two or three things. I hadn't been getting ANY until now on this new address.

Same for me BTW, but this address is also publicly available on my site, so who knows where that came from.