Personal Message generates SPAM?

[sevens0n]

Maybe I did a stupid thing? Sent out a personal message with my e-mail address in it. Got a notification in on my e-mail of a pm on the forum. When I check my PM's I cant see it? But the notification is showing up (Flashing)?

The message on my E-mail say's its from some stupid A$$ Buy government repos BS thingy?

Not a big deal for me really, but just want to let you know something is a bit fishy?
Sorry if I did a no-no. Would just like to now what's going on?

Thanks....

 

[TwoManyXS1Bs]

There's marketing spybots out there that screen traffic looking for e-mail addresses.
If you ever look at Craigslist ads, you'll note that most folks encode their addresses and phone #s.

A message with: SantaClause@yahoo.com will be added to the spam list...

 

[Travis]

sevens0n,

Here's what going on. The last couple of weeks spammers have been trying to get into user accounts on the site. I believe they were just trying easy passwords and the system was locking them out of each account after 5 tries. You may have received an email for your own account saying something like:

Dear [username],

Someone has tried to log into your account on XS650.com with an incorrect password at least 5 times. This person has been prevented from attempting to login to your account for the next 15 minutes.

The person trying to log into your account had the following IP address: _____________

If this was not you, it was probably a spammer trying to get into your account. There is nothing to worry about if your password is decent. If you get this message more than once in a short amount of time, please reply to this email to notify the site administrator.

Well they got into a couple of accounts and used them to send spam via Private Messages. After someone reports a spam PM, I've been changing the users password and manually deleting the spam PMs from the database. You may have checked your PMs right as I was cleaning things up. The notification emails for the PMs are already sent so there's not much I can do about those. I'm looking into blocking a huge range of IP addresses from the countries sending the spam. I emailed the users of the couple of accounts that they did get into and they admitted that they had very easy passwords. I suspect they were something like '1234' or 'password'. Any decent password wouldn't be cracked in 5 attempts. I know everyone hates when passwords require uppercase, lowercase, numbers, special characters, etc, but I may have to implement something like that.

Anyway, nothing to really worry about. You did nothing wrong. Just like with everything else on the internet, ignore the spam and I'll see what I can do minimize it. If anyone gets any spam via PM, use the report button

to report it. Same goes for spam or anything fishy in any post.

Did the blinking PM notification go away? If not I will have to look into that.

 

[gggGary]

Generally; putting your email address in a pm is a safe thing to do, the PM is not visible to anyone but the recipient (and Trav, if he is hot on the trail of spammers). In a post or anywhere else on the interweb where anyone can see it? not so much. The craigslist email reply system keeps your email safe the recipient only gets the CL reply address not your email.

 

[sevens0n]

Travis.. My PM notification is still flashing. (With no new message) I assume the message was deleted by the forum. Not a big deal, just letting you know.

Thanks guys, I'll think twice before doing that again. Thanks for the info.

PS... I have a fairly strong password.

 

[Travis]

Try logging out then back in.