A totally new reason to hate SPAM and viral marketing tricks
Source: Info Sys Sec
Today I found my email account at Yahoo.com deactivated. It is an account that I have been using since when Yahoo first opened its doors and offered free email to the masses.
I attempted to logon as has been my habit over the past couple of years to find my access had been terminated for a violation of their Terms Of Service.
Well... since I know that I have honestly and faithfully complied with their terms of service over the years, I wondered what could possibly have ticked Yahoo.com off that would cause them to unilaterally and without any prior notification deactivate my email account.
The answer rest in the way that email spammers and the current viral marketing companies are gleefully stealing addresses out of peoples MS Outlook address books and using them as the 'sender' of their virus packed emails, or as giving false endorsements to some software product, in the hopes that the recipient will trust the sender and run the program etc.
Ok... so what happens when 100,000 people get spammed by some viral marketing product or some virus packed email ? Well most will simply delete it. But a few will take time to report the spam or the attempted virus infected email to the hosting company where there email is 'deemed' to have originated from.
This appears to be what happened in my particular case.
The hint for this happened the other day when I received a nasty email from a total stranger who was mad that I had recommended via an email, a software product.
I took the time to write back to the chap and mention that I had personally flamed that company and their crummy product and their crummy viral market techniques. I was not to blame for him receiving the email.
For those who don't immediately understand what I mean by viral marketing products : when a given software product that you download off the internet is run, it searches YOUR address book and then sends out false recommendations about that product to everyone in YOUR email address book - substituting the various email addresses in YOUR email address book to appear to be the sender.
