There is a new way to abuse other people and expose peoples’ emails using blogs. Yesterday I got some interesting emails in my inbox. 2 of them, to be precise :
Subject : Re: [#111403528] [Jeff Kee’s Blog] New Comment On: Anna Nicole Smith’s death, and my reaction
Hello,
Thank you for your report. Your email has been provided to the Gmail Abuse team.
To help us process your request as quickly as possible, we recommend filling out the form specific to your situation by visiting the Gmail Security Center at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?security=1&ctx=security
….
The 2 of them had different case numbers attached to the top, and at first I could NOT understand what this was all about. I never reported anything go Google as abuse, and what’s more is that the title of it has my blog’s name and a title of one of my posts on it!
So I started doing some snooping around to figure out how this could have happened, and why.
Now, first of all the email’s title format resembled that of the comment follow-up notification. It’s a plugin that allows people to subscribe to comments, and whenever somebody else enters a comment, they get a notification to their email address. So somehow Google was getting those emails, and the responses appeared to be automated responses.
I went to that specific post regarding my take on Anna Nicole Smith’s death, and there was a comment made by Hal Turner (you can still see it there) with a rather offensive comment that is perfect to get people fired off, and write response comments. When I looked at his comment from the wordpress admin, this is what I saw :
So there it was : He typed abuse@google.com as his email, and turned on the subscribe-to-comments option in order to have all notification of new comments be sent to abuse@google.com! And I was getting the automated responses from Google for this.
I quickly changed the email to something else, but I left the comment there just to see if there’s anything else that can be done about it.
I don’t really see what this can accomplish other than perhaps listing my email as somebody that constantly emails the Google abuse team with no actual abuse, or if this is supposed to be bad for my website’s appearance to Google, but it was an unpleasant one anyhow. Oh, the abuser’s IP is right up there…! If any of you who love me knows much about hacking etc., any favours would be welcomed!!! Haha.
