Mistargeted spam

[jwgh]

I was spammed by a site apparently devoted to vegetables, which suggested I put a link to their site on one of my episodes of Scientifiction Theater, the one entitled The Power of Brine. Whee!

Subject: Re: www.jwgh.org/ark/articles/scientifiction.html
To: spog@jwgh.org
From: vegetables@[redacted].com
Reply-To: spog@jwgh.org <- Hm, this is clever

Hello,

I checked your website http://www.jwgh.org/ark/articles/scientifiction.html and I believe it is compatible with mine, and I think it would be great to make a link exchange. My name is Paul Cabay and this is my site: [redacted]/vegetables.

What do you say? If the answer is yes then all you have to do is to visit my online submission form [redacted]/vegetables/form.html and introduce your data there and your link will be up on my site in a few hours.

And this is my linking information :

URL: http://www.[redacted]/vegetables/ Title: Vegetables Directory Description: vegetables related news, books and web resources

or just cut & paste this HTML

-START -

<a href="http://www.[redacted].com/vegetables/">Vegetables Directory</a> - vegetables related news, books and web resources.<br><br>

-STOP -

Thank you kindly!
Paul Cabay

P.S. Should you consider my email unwanted, you don't need to worry because I will not email you again unless you contact me.

Comments

[grumblepants.livejournal.com]

I recently received a very very very similar spam from someone who seems to be on a developer's email list that I subscribed to, but in this case the site was a very lame casino portal.

I suspect a virus (or similar) is sending these emails. Hmm.

[jwgh]

OK, reading this I got curious and decided to see what the site was. It appears to be some kind of automatically generated portal about vegetables. There are links to the following:

• A cookbook.
• A collection of Fox Trot cartoons titled Your Momma Thinks Square Roots Are Vegetables
• A book about how to make soap using herbs and vegetables.
• A book about gardening.

(If the suggestion that The Power of Brine would fit right in didn't raise my suspicion that the thing was automatically generated, the inclusion of the Fox Trot book certainly would have.)

The site is hosted by utyx.com. Searching for that domain finds at least one other almost identical email about a topic other than vegetables.

How long before they email me inviting me to join their naked Marina Sirtis gifs webring?

[grumblepants.livejournal.com]

Automatically generated vegetable portals will be the death of teh intarweb!!!1!!

Haw! Ditto.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I got a similar email a month or so ago, which thought that perhaps my first SFP story entitled Dry Bones (http://www.seanet.com/~sunburn/drybones.html) would be appropriate for their paleontology section. I'll dig it out at home and see if it did the reply-to trick on mine as well.

Re: Haw! Ditto.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Also, I searched for utyx.com by mistake, instead of opening the page (I was using opera's shortcut to google by habit) and it came up with qozi.com, which appears to be producer of the robot in question. When google cached the utyx.com, it went to the qozi homepage, but now utyx has no homepage ("Comming Soon" [sic]). Qozi appears to be exactly the same as utyx, but with different portals:
http://www.qozi.com/dictionaries/ looks a lot like
http://utyx.com/vegetables/

Slightly more legit.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 10:15:17 -0700
Subject: Paleontology Resources
To: sunburn
From: paleontology@qozi.com
Reply-To: paleontology@qozi.com nothing unusual there

Hy there, "Hy?"
I'm James Cullen and I'm the webmaster of this site: "qozi.com/paleontology" which contains books, news groups and categorized links. I believe that our sites are compatible and it would be great if you would like to swap links. The site I'm talking about is: http://www.seanet.com/~sunburn/drybones.html.

So, if you are willing you can use this info to link to my site:

URL: http://www.qozi.com/paleontology/
Title: Paleontology Resources
Description: paleontology related news, books and web resources

[etc.]

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

Hee. I'm amused to see that in Coolidge Mercer's first line, he pronounces the name of the show as Scientification Playhouse. For years and years and years, I parsed Scientifiction and Scientification. I was horribly disappointed when Matt corrected me. I still prefer my version.

[jwgh]

Whoops! My typo, but since you both brought it to my attention and prefer the typo the corrected version, I will leave it unaltered. It seems only fair!