Stop the hate mail!

2 July 2008 - 16:59

I started up the computer this morning to find a bunch of emails in the Webmaster's inbox telling me in no uncertain terms to stop sending unwanted mail. The language used provided an eye-opening insight into the stress caused by spam - something I'd forgotten since I started using Gmail, which reliably diverts all the unsolicited mail into a spam folder so I never see it. We don't send out bulk email, apart from the Daily Software Deals opt-in newsletter which contains clear instructions on how to unsubscribe, so I'd never experienced this before. Then I realized that some lowlife had used our URL shortener xaddr.com to cloak a link to his site, and then sent this out to thousands of unfortunate recipients.

The first thing to do was to delete the link, ban the domain it linked to, and ban the IP that submitted it - though I'll be the first to admit that the latter will achieve little, since spammers generally don't work from a fixed IP address. Fortunately one of the complainers copied the email containing the link so I could see which one it was, though it would have been easy to work out, as by the time I knew of the problem 290 people had already clicked on it!

The next thing was to add some text to the xaddr.com contact form, explaining that we are just providing a service that turns a web address into a short URL, and if someone then uses that short URL in a spam email, it is not our fault. The tone of most of the emails I received was pretty unpleasant, understandably enough, but it is a bit upsetting to be on the receiving end of such ire when you are just trying to provide a useful free service.

All of the complaints were in the webmaster's Gmail Spam folder. This leads me to think that many of the recipients of these emails just marked them as spam in Gmail, with the result that any email containing the same xaddr.com short URL will now automatically get classed as spam. Hopefully Google hasn't blacklisted the xaddr.com domain as a whole so that mail containing any xaddr.com address gets classed as spam, or that would detract from the usefulness of the service.

I suppose other URL shortening services suffer from the same problem. Some, I have noticed, treat the ability to cloak the real destination address as a benefit of the service for affiliate marketers and the like. However, xaddr.com can and will delete all links used for such purposes, as well as banning the creation of any further links to that domain as soon as they come to our attention.