Usenet spam, still a thing

Posted on 2015-11-06 13:28 +0000 in Tech • 1 min read

This just turned up in email a little earlier:

Yay! Spam!

What's of particular interest is the email address this was sent to. It was one that I only ever (to my knowledge) used for posts to Usenet. While my gmail spam folder is filled with emails to that and other addresses I used for Usenet over the years this is the first bit of "proper" spam I've had to it in a long time.

It's signficant that it's some sort of Xbase-related thing too. I think the Usenet group I posted to more than any other will have been comp.lang.clipper. Unless I had some lapse of judgement at some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s (I think I only got the davep.org domain in 1999, now I think about it) the address this was sent to was used nowhere else.

I've also never been a "Visual Objects and/or Vulcan.NET user". While I did once own a copy of Visual Objects (two copies actually -- a beta and then a final release) it wasn't in a way that I'd have been on some mailing list and even if I had the address in question wouldn't have been the one used.

So, yeah, great way to impress me with a new product: make your first contact with me look exactly like some old Usenet spam.

Edit to add: I've since had it confrimed by the sender of the email that my address was indeed pulled from comp.lang.clipper.