I have a unique login email address for this website and forum that has not been given to any other party.

I have started to get SPAM being sent to this address with a subject title of
"wanna get laid tonight"

Has anyone else suffered and been targeted?

There's many ways that address can get harvested and targeted. A virus on your PC, a "web page crawler" to name two. Sometimes they just "generate" addresses I'm bulk.

If you've only just started getting spam after having an email address for 2 years that's quite impressive!

I get huge amounts of bulk spam usually has dozens and dozens of similar email addresses in the 'sent to' section of the email

Mikexx said:

I have a unique login email address for this website and forum that has not been given to any other party.

Has anyone else suffered and been targeted?

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Yup. New spam today from an address only ever used to sign up to FiatForum.
I have experienced this before, and it may not be something that's happened in recent days, but could have happened years ago.
Spammers just choose today to start using the list.

200SXJon said:

Yup. New spam today from an address only ever used to sign up to FiatForum.
I have experienced this before, and it may not be something that's happened in recent days, but could have happened years ago.
Spammers just choose today to start using the list.

Click to expand...

I joined 2 years ago.

It's certainly possible that someone associated with the forum took the email address and sat on them for a while before selling them on.

Most websites will create occasional fake IDs to ensure that the time of any leakage of addresses can be narrowed down.

so your accusing someone backstage of doing this

ChrisUK said:

There's many ways that address can get harvested and targeted. A virus on your PC, a "web page crawler" to name two. Sometimes they just "generate" addresses I'm bulk.

Click to expand...

I agree that email addresses can be harvested.

Since I use the same principle for many other websites I would expect these also to succumb to the same style of spam if my PC was infected. But these other email address are clear of spam.

Are you suggesting a web-crawler could capture email addresses from this site?

RuSZ said:

so your accusing someone backstage of doing this

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My thoughts exactly ...

I just got your email address from your public profile and downloading your v-card ...

AndyRKett said:

I get huge amounts of bulk spam usually has dozens and dozens of similar email addresses in the 'sent to' section of the email

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This is a unique email address not given to anyone else. I've received a total of 15 emails to this address, 2 of which are recent spam, the other 13 are legitimate emails from this forum.

Not exactly a big issue though, is it? Or am I missing something here ...

In the overall scheme of things, I dread to think how much email I receive per day - spam gets dealt with in a blink, usually automatically.

Stu DemonD said:

I just got your email address from your public profile and downloading your v-card ...

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Many thanks for that.

That is extremely worrying that by default my email address is available to all and sundry without my knowledge.

Stu DemonD said:

Not exactly a big issue though, is it? Or am I missing something here ...

In the overall scheme of things, I dread to think how much email I receive per day - spam gets dealt with in a blink, usually automatically.

Click to expand...

you get my email

wouldnt be suprised if thats in the spam filter

Mikexx said:

That is extremely worrying that by default my email address is available to all and sundry without my knowledge.

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Turn it off in UserCP then ...

Extremely worrying? It may be hassle but I would never use those words to describe it. Sorry.

RuSZ said:

you get my email

wouldnt be suprised if thats in the spam filter

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Yes mate, got it! Lucky me

its not like its your personal email

in your settings you can change you information thats available.

Im sorry, but i bet you can steal most peoples identity through facebook! thats a hell of a lot worse than recieving some spam you can just delete.



strange that i havent had any spam... then again i wouldn't send it to myself :devil:

Mikexx said:

This is a unique email address not given to anyone else. I've received a total of 15 emails to this address, 2 of which are recent spam, the other 13 are legitimate emails from this forum.

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I think you've missed my point, essentially an email is sent to [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] over and over again millions of times to every possible combination you can imagine it really doesn't matter that it's a unique address because these messages are sent out automatically and will eventually find your unique address, if a message doesn't get bounced back to its origin it tells the automatic system that there is a live/working email address and they can add the address to a data base which they can sell on to other spammers

Though as pointed out your address is freely available via the forum

AndyRKett said:

I think you've missed my point, essentially an email is sent to [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] over and over again millions of times to every possible combination you can imagine it really doesn't matter that it's a unique address because these messages are sent out automatically and will eventually find your unique address, if a message doesn't get bounced back to its origin it tells the automatic system that there is a live/working email address and they can add the address to a data base which they can sell on to other spammers

Though as pointed out your address is freely available via the forum

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I don't think I have missed the point. I have a domain. Lets say mydomain.co.uk

I might use [email protected] for this forum.

If I also received spam to [email protected], [email protected] etc I might have agreed with you. However in this case it was two emails to [email protected] and no others.

I have seen the random approach you mention and a dictionary type but not very often. The worst is when spammers use my domain as a sending address, where most bounce due to failed SPF authentication etc.

It is interesting that I haven't received any spam since my posts.

Mikexx said:

It is interesting that I haven't received any spam since my posts.

Click to expand...

so what you're actually saying is that the forum or rather those who run it are sending you spam and because you've posted here they've stopped sending this spam???