New gmail contact policy

Gmail has now implemented a new policy for managing your Gmail contacts. Instead of automatically adding all email addresses you send to as contacts, they now distinguish between your contacts and your suggested contacts. If they would have done something like this a long time ago, the mess (read the spam) generated by Konnects to everybody in my gmail contact list would have been considerably less severe!
However, I agree with Blogjunkies that Gmail has not fixed the automatic and very loose contact handling, but mainly just made their contact policy more complicated.

Blogpost by Blogjunkies: "Gmail Tries to Be Less Creepy, Fails"
Blog by Gmail: "Updates to Gmail contact manager"

Sending spam mails

I would classify myself as a spammer now - even if by accident.
I received one of those numerous "Join my network" kind of emails. Curious as I am, I went to the site to check it out, though I knew already that I do not really need more professional networks than LinkedIn. This new network site is called Konnects. As a service, they offer to check if anyone of your contacts are already in their network. I let them check my gmail contacts by using my gmail account login, and I could see that only two of my contacts are presently using Konnects. Then their site offered to send invitations to all the contacts on my list, and I decided "No, I do not want to bother anyone with this new site", so I deselected all from the list. Now at this point I must have made a mistake, or the website has a bug, for what happened is, that Konnects sent invitations to everybody in my contact list. This includes not only emails of my friends, family and colleagues, but also every email address that has ever sent mail to me on my gmail address, including mailing lists and support and no-reply email addresses.
Now you might think that at least it was a single event, no harm done in the long run. But, Konnects did not only send one, but on average three invites to each email address! I felt something had to be done, so I wrote an email to all my contacts, excusing for the spam behaviour of the Konnects invitation mailer. However, it turns out, gmail has a limit for sending emails. If you send more than 500 mails, they will block you for 24hrs! So now I am not only a spammer, I am also locked out of my favourite mail program for 24hrs, making it impossible to reply directly to all the mail I receive for the rest of the day. :(

*Sigh* at least, as Philip says with a smile: "It could be worse!"

Illustration courtesy: Linuxfocus.org

Clever scam

I got a pretty clever scam email the other day, advertising for a website with native art of some sorts. The tone was like a personal invitation, no misspellings, and plausible names for the organisations involved. The only thing that gave it away was that it was not addressed to me.

Today I saw a clever scam website. They pretend to do a competition for amateur photographers, maximum of one photo per contestant. They promise a grand prize and official publication of all winning photos. From the upload page there is nothing strange, other than that there are no links to e.g. winning photos. I knew immediately it was a scam when I saw the root page of the site, where they ask you how much money you want them to send you if you fill in the form(!!!). Of course every contestant is declared a winner, and you can buy (!) a plaque with your name on it and a (bad quality) book containing all winning photos, that is every crappy photo that was uploaded to their site.

Beware of similar scams and when in doubt, just do a few minutes googling the website or organisation name before giving away your email address or even worse: sending them money.