As a WordPress user I haven’t had much first-hand experience with MT-Blacklist (a system for combatting comment spam on Movable Type, though the data has been adapted for use on other toolkits), but it was enough to be suspicious when I found this in my inbox:
Thank you for supporting www.jayallen.org we are currently moving your receiving this email because you subscribed to our MT-Blacklist. We reserve the right not to remove you from this list since you signed up for it. We are secretly thrilled that are attempt at helping the search engines remove sites in our mt-blacklist. However since we feel this is at a comercial cost to those website we have in fact crippled some mamma and papa sites along the way they where attacted by blog spammers successfully getting our site removed from the engines In a unbiased attempt to eliminate the problem we are resetting our blacklist since this is the only fair way of deciding who we have harmed unintentially. If this doesn’t occur in the next week look forward to getting our next wave of emails. Best Regards, Jay Allen * proffessor of faith * Please visit http://jayallen.org/ and tell us what you think please don’t try and ask to unsubscribe to this newsletter since at my website that is not a option either.
The spelling’s atrocious, the attitude is worse (and not what I would expect from what I do know of the site and its proprietor), and it smacks of revenge and a smear campaign. “Hi, I’m (impersonating) so-and-so, don’t you find me offensive?”
To top it off, it was sent to my work address—which I wouldn’t have used in connection with MT-Blacklist even if I had given them my address for some reason—from a random domain on a Shaw Cable connection.
Yes, this was beginning to sound like a Joe Job, a forged spam run designed to discredit or harrass the victim.
Sure enough, JayAllen.org has posted this notice:
NOTE: If you are visiting because you’ve received an email containing a mock up of my front page, I apologize. Some ridiculously immature person (a pissed off spammer most likely) is spamming people with details about this site as if it comes from me. Trash it, move on and have a nice day.
I didn’t see a mock-up of his home page, but a look at the source shows that there is HTML in there… just none that defines any formatting!
Wow, rule #1 and rule #3 (spammers lie, spammers are stupid) in action!
This is ridiculous, I can’t believe that comes from Jay. It’s an irony though.
What’s even funnier is that MT Blacklist has damn all to do with search engines- after all, most people have (at least temporary) nofollow on their comments/trackbacks now, so the message is apart from badly written, factually incorrect which makes it even easier to see through the impersonation