I’m pissed off with keywordspy spy!! I thought this is a real deal. I used to get this kind of people contacting me offering this and that, but I normally don’t take it seriously. But when keyword spy who sounded like key web researching contacted me, I was thinking maybe I should try this. Furthermore they do have decent and quite good pagerank and alexa traffic. So I replied their email, put their URL on my blogroll, and waited impatiently to get FULL access to their website.

There are few words from me

• if you’re contacting someone to do something as exchange of your offer, please reply it ASAP. In this case I’ve put your link in blogroll, and I received nothing. Are you hoping during this period Google will notice my link back to you and consider it as valid ‘VOTE’ to you??  If yes, you’re ‘clever’. Trying to get free back link free of charge.
  
• Even if you’re outsourcing someone to contact each bloggers, make sure you have enough bandwidth to reply. If not, please STOP it. I’m off now!!

Read their nice request. Btw I feel that this post is most suitable to be under SPAM category

zakifahmi[at] gmail [dot] com

show details Jan 22 (4 days ago)

Reply

Hello Blogjer,

You are being contacted via Blogjer by Kelly. Kelly has provided the following information so you may contact them:

  Email: kelly@keywordspy.com
  Phone: 1-877-520-8596
  Website: http://www.keywordspy.com/
  Reason: Other (explain below)

Message:
  Greetings,

It gives us great pleasure to introduce to you KeywordSpy, a search engine tool that generates keywords for ad campaigns in the Internet’s most popular search engine sites. KeywordSpy

It is in this light that we humbly request that KeywordSpy
be included in your lists of sites that could be used for creating
powerful online ad campaigns. It would be interesting to note some of
the features our site has to offer:

•  The most comprehensive keyword database with over a billion keywords and counting
•  Regular updates on keyword databank including search and keywords from our partnership with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other reliable data servers
•  99% percent search results accuracy
•  Instant downloading capabilities on all search results
•  Offers exclusive country keywords (US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and South Africa) and more to be added soon
•  The only keyword tool that displays Ad Rank, Competitor Count and PPC Cost of keywords
•  Watch List, Search History Logs and other handy tools for easier keyword researching
•  Provides Excellent Support Service
•  User friendly search log accessibility through the use of either Keywords or Domain names

We offer a one month FULL ACCESS for interested web or directory site owners that would want to add KeywordSpy as a link in their site.

Our link is http://www.keywordspy.com/ – Html version; KeywordSpy – keyword research technology .

Simply
respond to this email and ask for the activation of your account. Once
an access is created, rest assured that your site’s email address will
not be bombarded with marketing letters and emails regardless whether
you agree to use our search tool or not. We highly value your privacy.

We also have KeywordSpy Affiliate Program where you can earn 25% Commission for every subscription that may originate from your site. More details at http://www.keywordspy.com
also generates information by using keywords in identifying key
competitors that may also be advertising in the same search engine./affiliate.php .

If you have any question or may need additional information regarding KeywordSpy please let us hear from you and we will be glad to respond or assist you in your queries.

Thank you very much and best regards.

KeywordSpy.

kelly@keywordspy.com
http://www.keywordspy.com

P.S.
This is an advertisement and a promotional mail strictly on the
guidelines of CAN-SPAM act of 2007. We have clearly mentioned the
source mail-id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject lines
and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your mail
address through our own efforts on the web search and not through any
illegal way.
If you find this mail unsolicited, please reply with
“Remove” in the subject line and we will take care that you do not
receive any further promotional mail.

————————–
Other Data and Information:
  IP Address: 59.95.40.246
  Time Stamp: Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
  Referrer: http://www.blogjer.com/contact/
  Host: 59.95.40.246
  User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
  Resolve IP Whois: http://www.arin.net/whois/

Looks familiar with the email below? Yes, this is one of the emails caught by Gmail filter. Ok, if you happen to receive spam emails with image inserted (it looks like the image below), do not open them. Why?? See the explanation below.

Why you can’t

According to Wikipedia –

Web bugs are used by e-mail marketers, spammers, Cyberstalkers and phishers, to verify that e-mail addresses are valid, that the content of e-mails has made it past the spam filters, and that the e-mail is actually viewed by users. When the user reads the e-mail, the e-mail client requests the image, letting the sender know that the e-mail address is valid and that e-mail was viewed. The e-mail need not contain an advertisement or anything else related to the commercial activity of the spammer. This makes detection of such e-mails harder for mail filters and users.

So if you have opened this kind of email before, the sender will know that your email is valid, and that you’ve been reading his email. So he knows that you’re one of his ‘loyal readers’, and you’ll get a higher chance to receive this email again in near future.

Don’t worry too much, if you’re using email client such as MS Outlook or online email client such as Yahoo Mail or Google Gmail, this shouldn’t be a big problem, since the embedded URL or images will not be downloaded automatically. BUT, the spam filter does not really work properly, yeah nothing is perfect in this world. How to identify your email client is protecting you well??? Btw, I’m only covering on email clients that I frequently use.

Yahoo Mail

By default, the settings should be there. However, it seems that Yahoo Spam filter does not work well sometimes (worse than Gmail). To modify it,

1. From your top right menu, click ‘Option’ -> ‘mail option’
2. On your left bar menu, choose ‘Spam’ It will display menu like below. Choose them according to your needs

Gmail

I don’t see this setting on Gmail Setting menu. By default Gmail won’t display images, and there are options for each emails on whether to download the images or not (I’m sure you’re familiar with this).

MS Outlook

By default, the setting works fine. You’ll see this message below on each email containing images

To edit the settings, from the top menu bar, choose ‘Tools’ – ‘Option’ – ‘Security’ tab – ‘Change Automatic Download Settings

Finally, don’t let your email crowded by spam emails.

update 18-Jan-2008

Yahoo Mail has updated their anti spam filter

I’m not sure if you notice about it or not, but there are lesser comment spams lately. My blog particularly, received less spams started last December, Alhamdulillah. Oh, what a wonderful world without spam. I believe they’re also taking a break and celebrating the festive and holiday season that had just finished. Do you know, that it is actually not easy to be a spammer, you have to buy or build a huge list of email, write a nice email to ‘help’ (or fool) people around and send hundreds of emails everyday. It must be a very tiring day huh??

Akismet & Spam Karma
Early December, Akismet seems like not filtering spams good enough, flooding my comment section with spams, and since I had enabled comment approval for first time commentators, my email is flooded with new comment notifications as well. It prompted me to enable back Spam Karma to assist Akismet, in their continuous and endless war against the evil spam. Thanks a lot to both of you for the hard work in protecting me from the evilness of spam, so I can blog peacefully. I appreciate your effort very much.

Email spam
I didn’t count the spam emails, since most of them directly goes into the spam folder. But I’m also seeing an increase of spammers from Malaysia, with Malay names, (Sorry I have to say that, shame on you!!) and of course in bahasa Malaysia. Does it mean that the internet marketing in Malaysia has reached to the new height? New height that you’d want regardless if it is halal or not. Do think of it over again and again before you press another send email button to anonymous receiver.

Happy new year, I hope you’d change
I would like to wish a happy new year 2008. May 2008 be a turning back from you being a spammer. Oh before that, dear Mr/Mrs/Ms or tuan/puan spammer, what is your new year resolution?

p/s: the picture is not related to the story. They’re not spammers, but i think they’re from spam.com

I received this spam email from unknown/spammer aka unethical internet marketer who is promoting Mike Filsaime’s free report. There is nothing wrong promoting Mike’s report, indeed I have registered it earlier, but you’re doing unethically, greedy and do not respecting other person’s feeling and privacy

I know you’re working hard to earn a dime from internet (such as buying email list from unauthorized 3rd party, drafting the best ever sentence to promote the product, register new email address to ‘promoting’ this, so that Gmail or yahoo mail or other email provider won’t throw your email to SPAM folder and etc) but you have made 1 BIG BIG mistake. You didn’t cloaking your affiliate links. Other party will be able to steal the sale by changing the affiliate link to theirs

I believe you’re newbie spammer want to get rich quick; otherwise you won’t do such a mistake. I’m not going to tell you how, go find out your self but I hope you won’t get rich forever doing this. Btw, your email is ‘resting’ in peace in my SPAM email.

Salam sejahtera,

Saya ingin berkongsi dengan anda satu lagi peluang buat duit dengan hanya mengedarkan ebook percuma. Ini bukan kali pertama saya berkongsi peluang anda dan saya tahu ramai juga yang telah berjaya. Apa yang penting, anda mesti ada akaun Paypal untuk membolehkan anda menerima pembayaran komisennya.

Baiklah, seorang Internet Marketer terkemuka dunia iaitu Mike Filsaime sekali lagi muncul dengan ebook laporannya The Death of Network Marketing. Ebook ini ditulis bersama Dr Ellie Drake yang merupakan pakar pemasaran network dan MLM.
Dapatkan laporan percuma ini yang menerangkan ancaman terhadap pemasaran rangkaian seperti MLM dan bagaimana anda boleh buat persediaan menghadapinya.

Laporan ini ringkas (45 mukasurat) dan menarik isinya. Jadi dapatkannya segera dengan klik di sini: http://www.the-death-of-networkmarketing.com/?see-why=5189098 (link removed and modified)

picture is taken from http://www.suescornerweb.com

Occasionally, I received the emails especially related to financial services notifying something wrong or to update my account. The funny thing however is, these emails were sent randomly including the email that does not subscribe to that particular service

Whenever you received this kind of emails, just ignore it. Do not click the link provided. The better action would be forward it to the respective company’s email such as spoof@paypal.com for Paypal

Btw, screen shot below is the latest spoof email that i received. The sender’s email address should give you clear idea from where they’re coming from, NOT from Paypal

Lately also, I received a lot of spam email from Malaysian, offering non sense services and pledge for donation. I’ll normally not read the whole content; the ‘report spam’ button is the best way to teach this fellow their unethical behavior. Do not hesitate to do that, instead of delete the email, ‘report to spam’ will direct the email to spam folder in future

Quoting Yahoo’s FAQ,

reports of spam originating from a Yahoo! Mail account (i.e.,user@yahoo.com) receive our special attention. Since spamming is expressly prohibited in Yahoo!’s Terms of Use, any account caught spamming will be cancelled.

More Security Tips (taken from Maybank2u.com). However, tips below does not applied to all e-commerce website. Each system has their own tips and these information only acts as general knowledge to us

• Don’t open suspicious e-mail attachments.
• Avoid downloading free programs. These may incorporate hacker-friendly software.
• Download security updates such as MS, your antivirus regularly.
• Don’t use the “remember password” function because this information can be easily accessed by hackers.
• Clear your cache (information stored in your computer memory) each time you log out. .

Actions to report spam
You also can report spam email and search engine result by using link and email below

Google – to report spam result
FTC – to report spam email, send email to spam@uce.gov