Brave Tech World

February 1, 2007

THU 1 FEB 2007

A real press contact or the most sophisticated spam ever. By Marcelo

 

    I just received this email on our "press" alias. Take a look and tell me what you think...

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From: Jennifer [xxxx@ecyberscreen.com]

To: press@sampa.com

Subject: articles about how to create a web page for sampa.com

 

I'm assuming that sampa.com (Create a Website for Free) is your site.

 

I'm doing research for a company that will be writing an article about how to create a web page. This company is considering featuring your site in this article. If your company is selected, they would place the article on their popular, online publication.

 

I would need to hear from you soon if you're interested in being featured. You can either reply to this email or call 877-838-9862. Leave a message and I'll forward it to them so they can return you call.

 

Thanks,

Jennifer

 

ECyberScreen

6245 Bristol Parkway, Suite #101

Culver City, CA 90230-6983

877-838-9862

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    I looks like spam. They extracted key phrases from the page (or a search engine, maybe del.icio.us?), to make it look very appealing and send an email to press@[domain]. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure they will charge a PR fee, or publication fee or some other scam like that.

 

    Over the past two years I received dozens of press emails and they never look like that. Usually a reporter says that he is going to do a story about X and he is interested in knowing if what we are doing fits into that. They always, always say who they are (I can find them on the web) and which publication they work for.

 

    Spam Status: Confirmed!

 

 

THU 1 FEB 2007

Why are a bunch of Barbie pictures appearing on my blog? By Marcelo

    No, you have not gone crazy. They did appear on the blog.

    I tried to use Sampa's "Post by Email" feature to forward a funny email I've received to my blog. Turn out there was two bugs that preventing it from happening.

    First, it was not necessarily a bug, but the content of the email was not properly formatted HTML, so the system rejected it. More on this later.

    Second bug was that the email came with a bunch of pictures. When you send an email to Sampa with a bunch of pictures, the pictures are saved automatically to an album (that you choose), and then the blog post is created. So, the pictures were saved, but once the system tried to save the blog post it failed because of the invalid content. The bug here is that we should validate the content before we save the pictures.

    About that first bug, it happens because Outlook/Word generate an amazingly junk HTML. Sampa doesn't like that because it would litter the users website. I create a "WordCleanup" method to take care of that, but apparently it is not working well. I'll investigate more and put a fix soon.

    There you have it. I'm not a Barbie collector.