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Getting spammed from gmail accounts? February 6, 2009

Posted by Wes in General, search engines.
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I’ve started to get a lot of spam with requests to reply back to a gmail account. It’s strange that it came up all of a sudden.. perhaps I was lucky enough to get on someone’s junk list that they sold to some spammer. The address in the message is never the same as the From: or the Reply To:, and the name signed in the bottom is never the name in the From:

I’m generally not that interested in their offerings, but just as a service to those spammers, I thought I’d try to help them reach as many people as possible with their message. I’ll start to put the email addresses in this post, and I encourage you in the comments section to add your own if you are getting messages like this. Please post all the various addresses used, ie. the one in the To: the one in the ReplyTo: and the one listed in the body of the message.

Just to give an example, here’s the latest one I’ve gotten:

Hi, 

Are you interested in getting paid by major online retailers for completing
simple online surveys, participating in focus groups and to watch movie
trailers?
All you need is a little time and willingness to voice your honest opinion.
Our organization offers competitive remuneration for participating in simple
on-line surveys and forum discussion groups. What we offer is work from the
comfort of your own computer, determine your working time, express your
opinion freely about different kinds of products and services, and be paid
well. 

If you'd like to become one of our highly valued survey takers, please
e-mail me back to 1188haddockspike@gmail.com and we will send you additional information.

Please excuse us if this email is unwanted for you and we have disturbed you in some way, but this is a serious and sincere enquiry.

Best regards,
Katie Anderson
HR

And so here I go with the list of email addresses:

1188haddockspike@gmail.com
1185dilling.paula@gmail.com
kkz@altavista.net

If you’re interested, I also found this article on how to report this to google

I did it and they sent me some automated reply.

These are going to a lot of legitimate email discussion lists, for example

Another interesting tidbit is that they encode the email using base64, which is an obvious attempt to avoid spam filters.  When you view source on the email, all you see is something like this:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset="windows-1251"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165

SGksIA0KDQpBcmUgeW91IGludGVyZXN0ZWQgaW4gZ2V0dGluZyBwYWlkIGJ5IG1ham9yIG9ubGluZSByZXRhaWxlcnMgZm9yIGNvbXBsZXRpbmcNCnNpbXBsZSBvbmxpbmUgc3VydmV5cywgcGFydGljaXBhdGluZyBpbiBmb2N1cyBncm91cHMgYW5kIHRvIHdhdGNoIG1vdmllDQp0cmFpbGVycz8gD

 BpZiB0aGlzIGVtYWlsIGlzIHVud2FudGVkIGZvciB5b3UgYW5kIHdlIGhhdmUgZGlzdHVyYmVkIHlvdSBpbiBzb21lIHdheSwgYnV0IHRoaXMgaXMgYSBzZXJpb3VzIGFuZCBzaW5jZXJlIGVucXVpcnkuDQoNCkJlc3QgcmVnYXJkcywNCkthdGllIEFuZGVyc29uDQpIUg==

Here’s a blogger who mentions this

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