Spam for spock.com

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A few days ago, I received three identical spam messages, one to each of three different e-mail addresses (clickable areas removed):

From: Spock Team Subject: Head Geek wants you to check out spock.com I am testing out this new people search search engine called spock.com. It seems pretty interesting and you might want to do some searches on it for yourself, your friends, or your favorite celebrities. Their homepage is www.spock.com PS – If you click here, Spock can instantly find where all your friends are on the web. Later, Head Geek – Unsubscribe: Click Here

Wow, apparently my future self is working for this group of cretins and has access to a time machine, and wanted to make sure that I knew about them. Either that, or they’ve harvested the addresses from my public GPG key, which (so far as I know) is the only place where all three of them are listed. Hm, I wonder which of those scenarios is more likely?

(According to the headers, it actually is coming from them, so it’s not some third party trying to get them into trouble. And yes, I’m quite familiar with fake e-mail headers, and this one isn’t faked at all.)

I’m extremely irked by this. Not only are they spamming, but they’re lying and claiming to be me as well. The service might well be useful, but I refuse to ever deal with spammers.

UPDATE: A few days after I posted this, Jay from spock.com wrote a comment explaining the problem, so I wrote a follow-up to this post.

3 Comments

  1. How else better to demonstrate the power of a people search engine that snoops into people’s habits than to show how well it can find their personal information? (Rolls eyes.)

  2. How better to demonstrate that you’re a company with no ethical standards than to show how well you can spam the technological elite of the Internet? (Rolls Ploni’s eyes back to him, gotta be careful with those things.) 😉

  3. Hi – I understand your level of anger when your recieved this mail and I was equally angry when this bug accidently got into our mailer. What happened was

    1. Someone wanted to send you an invite to Spock. And it was there name that was supposed to be in the header of the mail.

    2. Our bug caused the name of the invitee to be in the header as opposed to the inviters name. I am sure you can see this is a bug since the email makes no sense that you would send yourself an invite

    3. Only you got an email that you are inviting yourself to Spock. It did not get sent to anyone else…..so if someone named “Tom” invited “Dick, Jane, and Harry” to Spock – Dick got an email saying he is inviting himself, Jane got an email saying she is inviting herself, etc, etc. when they all should have gotten an email saying that Tom invited them..Please rest assured that NO ONE else got an email saying that you invited someone.

    I am sorry that you were affected by this. If you are ever in the bay area, I will personally buy all of you lunch to apologize in person. This is a dumb bug that we caught in 24 hours and fixed asap.

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