I got a particularly incompetent and annoying email from
25QuidHosting.co.uk.

I contacted 25QuidHosting and they refused to tell me where they got my
email address, or why they felt entitled to use it. They did tell me
that they had sent out 2000 other messages (only 2000! I am honoured to
have been selected!) and only three other people had complained.

I would like to congratulate those three other people, as personally I
usually just delete this kind of thing. But today it was hot, I was
grumpy, and the use of a yahoo.co.uk address combined with a link to
their main site struck me as specially loony.

My guess is that 25QuidHosting.co.uk got my address by buying a CD of
email addresses harvested from usenet or the web.

25QuidHosting appear to be strangers to usenet (at least, I could not
find them through Google Groups).

I then did a whois, and found the domain was registered to
easymediasolutions.com. That domain points to 4uhosting.co.uk, which
has a nice anti-spam message in their terms and conditions. So I
emailled 4uhosting.co.uk suggesting that someone might be breaking their
rules.

I got a rather rude email back, threatening vague legal things. The
similarity of the spelling mistakes reminded me rather of the message
from 25QuidHosting, but then, so few people can spell nowadays.

I actually checked out their site because the name 25 Quid Hosting made
me think at first that they were part of the reputable cyberstrider
group (they are not).

I don't know if the name 25QuidHosting is close enough to one of the c-s
brands for them to take action for brand infringement, but if it is,
good.

Victoria (grouchy? Moi?)

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:35:39 +0100, Victoria Clare wrote:

I actually checked out their site because the name 25 Quid Hosting made
Of course they are not - as you imply, we are not into spam and do
discourage it. :-)

I'll take a look - thanks for pointing it out.

Regards
Denesh

In article <Xns93B9E5D49266Avictoriamarkpolesorg@195.8.68.207 >, one of infinite monkeys
at the keyboard of Victoria Clare <victoria@markpoles.org.uk> wrote:

So 1900 had better spam filters than you, 90 couldn't be arsed,
and half a dozen haven't got around to it yet:-)

--
Nick Kew

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:35:39 +0100, Victoria Clare wrote:
One thing I have done is reported them to Nominet - their web site
www.4uhosting.co.uk displays the Nominet Logo which they can not do if
they are not a member/tag holder - and even if they were one, they would
have had to sign a contract with Nominet..

Seeing as they register all their domain names and their customer domain
names via Totalregistrations, I did find it surprising that they were
displaying Nominet's logo when they had no direct affilitaion with the .uk
registry.

Regards
Denesh

In MsgID<h2v1fb.qj1.ln@jarl.webthing.com> inside of
uk.net.web.authoring, 'Nick Kew' wrote:

I wonder about the result of my idle thought on the subject of defence
mechanisms against spam that don't involve 'approved' servers, why
isn't there some sort of convention for using a keyword at the end of
the subject line to go with one's email address?

Y'know, something silly like 'carrots' at the end of subject for
auto-whitelist status? Done like that it would save the necessity of
any respondent using it everytime, just once to get onto the list.

Like the 'remove knickers to email me' tat that people have in their
sigs, but much smoother and much harder to automate.

The other one, that I've considered building in to my filter proggie
is to check against a (filtered) list of the 'reply to' or 'from'
addresses from my Agent data file (or any record of your newsfeed +
past emails).

That would (if written right) have the handy effect of barring the
idiots who don't believe in using real email addresses at all.



--
Dave J.

Requiem@freeuk.com

Victoria Clare <victoria@markpoles.org.uk> wrote in message news:<Xns93B9E5D49266Avictoriamarkpolesorg@195.8.6 8.207>...
Victoria, I also got this garbage sent to me (from a Hotmail account).
It was amateurish, but it did beat my University's spam detector so
perhaps that was the point. It came from a Blueyonder cable account.
So I complained directly to Blueyonder, and they assure me they have
dealt with the idiot who sent it out. They usually do.

Dave J. wrote:

[snip]

Also much harder to get wrong (hey, there are some odd people out there).

--
Jim Dabell

In MsgID<Xns93BA6002BD0B7auto352683WOMBAT@216.166.71. 238> inside of
uk.net.web.authoring, 'Santiago Zawojski' wrote:

Would it not be better to mung the 'reply to:'

--
Dave J.

Requiem@freeuk.com

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 01:06:24 +0100, Denesh Bhabuta wrote:
Nominet have today informed me they will be contacting Easy media
Solutions Ltd (4uhosting.co.uk, 25quidhosting.co.uk etc) and will be
asking them to remove the Nominet logo which is copyrighted and can only
be used under licence (and ony by Nominet members)

-Denesh

Dave J. <requiem@freeuk.com> wrote in
news:antahvcuirtbuu0uqaqpfrgh3roj6fjtsr@4ax.com:

NO!

The reply to is optional. If you're going to use it, use a real address.
XOVER doesn't return the reply-to, it does return to from.

Come on Dave, you've said exactly that sometime or other.