CR Backup Admin said:
You received a e-mail with a faked from address, so you know for a fact it came from CR?
I didn't say the mail came from CR. I'm saying the email-address used as recipient in the spam came from Canon Rumors in one way or another. I stand by that claim.
My perception is that the sender was faked in order to circumvent spam filters. However, I just deleted it and did not investigate any further.
CR Backup Admin said:
Sorry to disappoint you, but CR does not send spam, or even send e-mail, if you signed up for the newsletter, you might get that.
Am I to understand that the Datacolor mail in fact was sent from the Canon Rumors mail list? Are the spams a part of the mail list we signed up for?
CR Backup Admin said:
Its interesting that the OP uses a virtually identical email address to yours, his is extremely easy to guess.
Use something random, or not easy to guess. a email like CR or CanonRumors, for example only requires your domain.
About easy to guess email, they only need to know your domain - while that may be true in my case, the spam sent was targeted towards me as an canon rumors follower. To use a targeted spam sucessfully with the guessing addresses technique, the spammer would have to know that someone at my domain was a member of canon rumors and sigend up for your mail list. I'd say that seems very unlikely.
The spamming technique using a known sender is a targeted technique designed so that the recipients spam filters allows the mail to go through and so the recipient actually looks at it, since the recipient thinks it is a valid mail. It would be extremely elaborate to target all mail domains in the world and guess email recipients, on the whim that some tiny fraction of the domains has canon rumors users who will fall for the trick.
CR Backup Admin said:
...
And ... other members do not get them?
...
Not true. In this thread a few others are saying they are getting the same datacolor ad.
I have a friend who signed up for the list and got the same spam the same day. So certainly more than me is getting it. For all we know, thousands of people could be getting these mails but they just didn't go online here to tell you about it.
CR Backup Admin said:
...If you have a facebook account and follow canon rumors, hacked facebook accounts are as common as dirt. I would recommend that you change all of your passwords, if someone got your CR email, they may have other information or passwords. I cannot see your password, Its pretty securely locked up, but nothing is totally secure.
Again, I use a separate specific mail address on canon rumors and I use it nowhere else. The email associated with this account has nothing to do with any other account I hold. There is no way a hacked facebook account could be used to learn about my activities on canon rumors.
As for sending spam through the "Allow members to mail" it is not a valid angle on neither me nor my friend. I have this feature un-checked and my friend has no account on Canon rumors. We got the same spam the same day. The only thing that links these two e-mail-addresses with canon rumors is the mail list sign up.
CR Backup Admin said:
If CR was hacked, we would get a flood of people complaining in minutes, we have many tens of thousands of members. #377624 is the latest, we started with number 1.
I am not saying the site was hacked. But either the mail list was compromised or these ads are a part of the mail list.
Maybe the case is the latter and that would be the end of this discussion. I thought I signed upp for a canon rumors mail list (If I recall it correctly it was described as the sites whishes to interact a little bit tighter with its community). If I misunderstood, then no big deal. I can remove myself. But clearly I wasn't the only one thinking it was spam.