I’m Being Spammed By “IDG Connect”
I received an odd newsletter e-mail this morning. Odd because it looked like a perfectly legitimate newsletter, but it was from an outfit calling itself IDG Connect and claiming that I’m a “valued customer.” I’d never heard of the company before this, so far as I know, so I did some research.
It’s hard to find much information on them, other than their own website, but I finally discovered two comments on a mostly-unrelated Computerworld blog post. The first says:
I just happened on this blog, Googling to see if anyone else has trouble and/or was entered into the “challenge/response unsubscription loop from hell” while trying to unsub from IDG Connect…a newsletter I never subscribed to.
Well, these things do happen, and it might still be a legitimate mistake. But directly under that comment was this one:
I am unable to unsubscribe to IDG as well - I’ve tried using the option they listed in the email since they appeared to be a legit operation, but the only result is that now I get emails from them every day, not just once in a while.
So much for the theory that they’re legitimate. I’ll start training my spam filter to block their crap.
I’m writing this entry in the hopes that other people looking for information on this company (or trying to find out why they’re being spammed by them) will discover it, since there’s so little easily-accessible information about them.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I got an email from them too, it looks like they’ve managed to get past the spam filters, even google mail’s industrial-strength ones, by looking legit.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Yes, even my ThunderBayes setup said that it was definitely not spam. Oh well, both it and GMail will learn differently very quickly.
April 11th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
thanks: yes, i also tried to unsubscribe from them to no avail. i did as you said and i marked the latest one as spam in thunderbird and in gmail..
April 11th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Never try to unsubscribe from spam, that confirms to them that someone is receiving the spam in a live email address and you’ll just get more; either from them or from other spammers.
April 11th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Having once (once!) made that mistake, with another company, I can confirm that. But it’s not that simple in this case. As I said in the original entry, they appear to be completely legitimate, even to the point of being associated with major PC magazines. It’s hard to believe that a major company would dare to spam people, after all the spam lawsuits over the last few years.
April 16th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Ziff-Davis Publications, another computer magazine company, went bankrupt. Maybe they’re desperate.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I suppose that’s a possibility.
December 1st, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Oh my gosh I am recieving those retarded spam emails and its driving me insane because I can’t seem to get my spam filters in both outlook or the one through my ISP to filter out that crap. Every day I check my inbox to find out the E-mail I tagged as spam the day before back in my inbox. It keeps coming back like a bad dream…