Tag: spam
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I Regret To Say That GMail is Now a Spam Farm, or, Why You Should Really Get That Dedicated Email Address Now
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already.
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![Screengrab from a YouTube video showing a white woman with brown-and-red hair saying "please see the FAQs for any questions you have have around deed polls[sic] and the rules." alongside a logo for "Change Names".](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2026/06/changenames-youtube-video-978x480.jpg#29349)
The "ChangeNames.co.uk" Scam
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow.
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I find a lot of these "this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases" emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They're a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying "No, please help protect my brand identity, I'll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!"
Alt
Screenshot of scam email which begins "Dear CEO, This is a formal email. We are the Domain Registration Service company in Shanghai, China. I have something to confirm with you. Baokang Ltd sent a request on December 3, 2025. They desire to register "danq" as their internet keyword and Chinese domain names..." and goes on to try to bait the recipient into replying and expressing an interest in the domain names mentioned.
But I've always wondered - what happens if you reply and say "Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains." I'd know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)... but they can't admit that they know that.
Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)
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Do Contact Forms Attract More Spam than Email Addresses?
David Bushell, Luke Harris, and Kev Quirk all shared how they got less spam from exposing their email addresses on their personal websites than they did through their contact forms. That's not my experience, though, and I think I know why...
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Okay, is every company using AI to fuck up their mailing lists, now?
For the second time this week I've received an email from a company whom I'd explicitly demanded cease processing my PII. This time, in February they outright told me that they'd deleted my data and sent screenshots to "prove" it (which was already after they'd failed to unsubscribe me from their mailing lists in the first place).
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Just received an unsolicited marketing email from a company that I asked to remove me from their systems eleven and a half years ago (!).
I haven't heard from them since then.
The marketing email is sent using a platform that "uses AI to help you seamlessly connect with your customers". By which I assume the platform means "we'll crawl your email history to find anybody we can possibly spam".
Just gonna go grab my GDPR/DPA2018 beating-stick. This is gonna be a fun one.
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Roll Your Own Antispam
The Web contact form of a nonprofit I founded started attracting a huge volume of spam, and conventional tools weren't helping. But a little analysis allowed us to block almost all of it without compromising on accessibility, privacy, or the false-positive rate.
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Somewhat-Effective Spam Filters
I've tried a variety of unusual anti-spam solutions. Here's how they worked out for me.
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GMail Tip: Use A Plus Sign To Avoid Spam
Surely everybody by now knows that you can use a plus sign in your GMail address to dodge spam and improve email filtering. Wait, some people don't? Let's fix that.
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Pay To Post
Facebook is to introduce a new feature that will allow you to pay to "promote" your posts above those of your friends' other friends. Dan is reminded of Hashcash.
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An Idea - How To Get Treeware Junk Mail Banned
Here's a thought: a way to try to get unsolicited (treeware) junk mail banned -
Every time you receive a bit of junk mail, just go and put it back in the post box: it's almost all franked mail, and so the post office will re-sort it and deliver it back to you. Put a tally … -
I’m So Fucking Clever
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[this post was partially recovered on 24 November 2017]
I've had a great idea that I might try to implement sometime (or put of the stack of things I might …