I think whoever has been sending out spam in the name of Courting has stopped. I had no idea that with an “alias account” anybody can set up an account using any dot com address. Nobody had to hack into my cpanel or blog or anything.
This is legal. It shouldn’t be. The only recourses are to use the ultimate filter program and not allow any email with your URL to be sent to you, and to contact your ISP as technically they’re not supposed to let spam come through. We all know how that works….
I am totally hung up on how this is legally allowed. i understand the Internet is realtively new. Al Gore didn’t invent it until 1974 🙂 I adore Al Gore so I say that with both great fondness and sadness that he never had the chance to lead our country.
I understand that blogging began in 1997, the same year I bought my first PC. i hated the Internet then. Lucia and i went into chatrooms that were supposed to be about literature but were meeting places. We just weren’t interested.
I have watched the Internet change in the past decade. It is a much easier place to navigate. Thanks Google. Between your search engine and Gmail I’m a much more relaxed and happy person.
If I hadn’t switched to an Imac I know that my computer would have been very slow yesterday, probably have been corrupted and died a sudden and violent death.
I was actually going to send out apologizes to the people who sent me emails telling me to stop harassing them. Then I thought how stupid can I be?
People who go to the trouble of sending those emails wouldn’t believe me, could cause trouble and really i wasn’t going to dig through the email shard to see.
There has to be some kind of Internet regulations. I know that a solicitation directly asking for money in a Ponzi type scheme is considered to be fraud. Pretending to be Paypal is because again it’s a direct way to get money
Why isn’t there regulation so that if a person owns a dot com, or any other dot address, people can’t use the dot com address for spam purposes?
If the spam hadn’t stopped, i would have canned my blog. I don’t love it that much.
Yes we have filters now, and other safeguards to our computers.
But somebody was legally allowed to send out spam using my address. I consider that harassment and a crime as it’s my blog’s name that is being disparaged.
yeah that sucks. but if you’d quit your blog right when i just found it, i’d have been ticked. lol.
Pia, don’t feel bad recently I had someone sending and posting on boards with my name and ip. I had some back door things on there and ended up having to remove an apache server I had running all the time without my knowledge.
It is illegal to impersonate someone but it is hard to catch them. I’m not sure if you have ever read “finding norway” but she had something very similar happen to her in a very stalker like way and ended up having to close her blog to the general public.
These people suck and have nothing better to do.
You service provider might be able to help you and if it gets too bad – a lawyer.
Thanks Google. Between your search engine and Gmail I’m a much more relaxed and happy person.
I’m trying to think back to not being able to “google something” and failing miserably. Perhaps because I don’t really want to remember a time like that???
I would have been super pissed had I been you: that is harassment I think! Wow. Glad it stopped.
I think Cooper has it just right. Since you can’t catch them, you can only say they suck and I’ll offer my life for your right to do so.
I like the post title, by the way.
Doug beat me to it – like the post title, but not what you had to go through. That’s just vile and I hope it stops so you don’t need to waste your time any further.
Pia,
First off, as an art director, I absolutely adore the new look of your blog. Second, I’m sorry to hear about your spam woes. Third, since I know you’re big in the online writing community, I was hoping you may be able to spread the word about an article I wrote for a contest sponsored by author, Mitch Albom. ( http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976967591 ) Unfortunately, the contest isn’t just based on talent, but also by how many votes you receive on this site. I would greatly appreciate it, even if it’s just a vote from you. Thanks in advance and hope all is well with you.
Eventually, they stop. But, it takes awhile. I contacted my ISP to ask what to do when it happened to me and they said short of getting legal counsel there isn’t much you can do and even then it’s real hard to make it stop. But, I agree it’s a real pain in the patooie.
I should only be so populsr. 😉
I do not have an overwhelming amount of spam and no one wants to be me on line. I guess I should be glad, it sounds like a total pain in the neck. Good luck with it and don’t let it get to you.
That’s really strange. I don’t understand spammers. They’re the used car salesmen of the Internet, but they’re not selling anything remotely as useful.
I hope the spam stays stopped–it’s weird to think of how much the internet has become fused into our lives over the past 15 years
Yup. Nothing like spammers.
The problem gets more terrifying when you consider that still less than 20% of the world’s 6+ billion people even have access to the Net. Americans? We’re easy targets for spammers in the Developing World, because we have probably the world’s worst model for IT adoption – i.e. whatever’s cool-looking.
We’ve got children who think beating video games levels is the only important thing in life, while there’s 12 year olds in poor nations learning advanced coding, who know how to pirate software and break encryption protocols as easily as an egg…
-J
It’s too bad that, as the internet gets easier to navigate, the predators increase exponentially, and safeguards get more time consuming and expensive.. I don’t particularly like computers the way they are now. Too damn complicated. Maybe someday they will be like “Star Trek”… completely voice- enabled and simple to use. It’s a ways off, though.