3 ms·
Ask HN: What's the purpose of this type of mailform spam?
So I recently changed up my mailform handling for my website and I'm now noticing a steady stream of incredibly detailed and well formed mailform spam. A good one just came in that looks like this:
==============================
Name: Lilla Dobbs
Email: AmandaLanesh0@yahoo.com
Phone: 06-91009165
Comment:
My partner and I absolutely love your blog and find the
majority of your post's to be what precisely I'm looking
for. can you offer guest writers to write content to suit
your needs? I wouldn't mind publishing a post or
elaborating on many of the subjects you write concerning
here. Again, awesome web site!
==============================
* I've changed last name slightly (which still wouldn't match the name of the email) and the domain of the email address in case of the incredibly unlikely event that this email isn't spam.
So, the submits come from an IP, and a seemingly legitimate User Agent:
==============================
IP: 5.135.35.83
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0)
AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112
Safari/535.1
==============================
I guess the question is: what's the end-game here? Are they expecting a reply to the email address and then things kick off from there? Is this seeding to get through a couple legitimate emails to start conditioning spam detection algorithms?
These emails don't contain the most basic of spammy info:
1. no obvious keywords
2. no urls
3. no selling of a scam
It just really seems to me that it's crafted to get a reply. I just don't know why. There is obviously a purpose to this relatively new breed of spam (at least to my eyes), and I'd really be interested to know if anyone has the answer.
For some breadth on the messages, here's a sampling of others:
==============================
Hello there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a
team of volunteers and starting a new project in a
community in the same niche. Your blog provided us
valuable information to work on. You have done a
wonderful job!
==============================
Superb post however I was wondering if you could write a
litte more on this topic? I'd be very thankful if you
could elaborate a little bit further. Cheers!
==============================
Awesome issues here. I am very satisfied to look your
article. Thank you a lot and I am taking a look forward
to contact you. Will you kindly drop me a e-mail?
==============================
- duncan_bayne 13y agoA guess: they want you to let them contribute 'content' on your blog, which will in turn link to their payload (scam, malware, whatever).
- ereckers 13y agoI was wondering that too, but I was thinking that at some point that would take human interation: 1. i reply back and say thank you 2. they register for an account 3. i approve them and then they start spamming Maybe a Mechanical Turk type thing?
- lifeguard 13y agoMay it is a SEM gimmick? Get you to link to them?
- ereckers 13y agoThat's probably it and is in line with good old fashioned comment spam. I'm just not collecting a URL, so I'm not seeing them come through. I might just add one, hide it from my users and see how many of these comments come through accompanied with a URL. Without seeing the URL to tip it off as comment spam I may have just been overthinking it.