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February 20, 2006

I received another one of those spam messages that insists that I had responded to something else, thus giving my consent to be mailed.

As revealed in the source code view of the message, the subject matter is travel (one of my least favorite subjects). Here is the spammer's assertion:

Danny Goodman you responded on Apr 9 2004 12:18 with dannyg@dannyg.com.

The spammer is from California (or so his CAN-SPAM mailing address indicates), so I'll take the 12:18 time to be California time, and PM at that.

Nowhere in this assertion is an indication where I supposedly responded. Looking up the spamvertised domain flaunted throughout the message reveals that its record is not yet in the whois database, meaning that the domain was likely created within the past 24 hours. It is therefore unlikely that I "responded" to a Web site that didn't exist nearly two years ago. And since he won't tell me where I responded, I can only assume this information is false.

For the fun of it, I also checked my calendar to see if I was doing anything special on that day. It turns out that I was at a meeting with one of my clients from 10:00am to 3:30pm, plus a fair amount of driving time tacked onto each end. There was certainly no recreational Web surfing going on during that time. I doubt that I even had Internet access during that meeting.

Thus, this spammer is either making up this supposed response, or he bought my email address from a source bearing equally phony opt-in credentials. Without an audit trail—or a trail he's willing to reveal—such assertions are completely worthless. They also tell me that this guy is another spammer liar (Rules #1 and #2) who won't get my address verified by me unsubscribing from this list.