Spamz@-stic!
At the time of this writing, the website, spamza.com has been taken down. It’s been down for about a week, now. I know they’re trying to get it live again, but Spamz@ is having trouble finding a host. Why?
Spamz@ is quite a simple site. When you go to the homepage, you’re presented with a fairly stark page, and one fill-in box. It reminded me of the Google homepage. But what Spamz@ does, is actually quite nefarious. You fill in someone’s email address (preferably not your own) and they automatically subscribe that email address to HUNDREDS of free newsletters.
There’s no opt-in process where the newsletter sends you a confirmation email to which you have to reply before being officially registered. Once your email is submitted, you’re getting those newsletters.
To really complicate things, there are so many newsletters it’s effectively impossible to unsubscribe yourself from them, or to configure your spam filter / email rules to block them all. And let’s say you do find a way to unsubscribe. No problem. Whoever signed you up can resubmit your email address via spamza.com!
You may wish to simply change your email address. That will work, but think of the time it’s going to take you to change your email address for all those websites you do want to communicate with, or your friends, family, office, etc. And then, there’s no telling when your new email address will be submitted via Spamz@.
Here’s a short quote I captured from their site before they were taken down (typos are theirs):
Simply speaking, you put any e-mail, you click “Spam this email!” and we do the rest. The said e-mail will be registred to hundreds of daily newsletter and receive thousands of e-mails, most of them who avoid the junk filter. The point of this website? To spend as much newsletters as possible to as much people as possible. There are very few things the owner of the e-mail can do: change his e-mail address (but you can re-submit his e-mail), manually unsubscribe hundreds of newsletters (but you can resusbcribe him… if you are really evil) or ignore all the message (it becomes impossible to execute the most basic tasks). In short, SpamZa! is a very mean way to create a lot of problems
I think it is only a matter of time before spamza.com is up and running again. So be on the lookout for it. Please don’t use it, but do know that it’s out there. And if one site is doing this, there may be others.
:-Pratt
