Monday, December 31, 2007

Spam sometimes...

Clearing out my inbox at the end of the year I found this gem of an email sent to me yesterday. I was wondering if I could do something about this, because this is a rather scary mail. I just know I am going to get blasted with PR spam next year!

Hi! Wanted to be the first to wish you Happy New Year..on 1/1/08.

We have an updated database of 6000 of India's leading journalists. (TV and print) This email database maintained and updated as of 31st March'2007 contains the following details:-

1. Name 2. Office email id: @dnaindia.net etc. and/or Personal email id:
(@yahoo/gmail etc) 3. Media Name/(Hindu etc.) 4. City (New Delhi etc.) Maintained in Microsoft Excel Format and YOU will not find it anywhere else.

Includes senior and middle level journalists with leading newspapers, television channels, business press and magazines. e.g . ToI, IE, Outlook, Business Today, NDTV etc. Includes VS (HT), BK (ToI), RS
(CNN-IBN) and PC (Aaj Tak) among 6000 others.
Can be imported into all email merge software for personalised sending.

You ARE going to use it for blasting Press Releases, new product announcements,corporate briefs or press conferences to these 6000 public opinion moulders.

We would like to sell this CLICKING database to you.

If interested, to receive a no-obligatory, sample list of 100 from our master database of 6000 pls reply blank email [address withheld] with
SEND100FREEMAIL30dec07* in the Subject.

regards,

customer support

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

who on earth is BK in the Times?

Anonymous said...

The same spammer (the language is the same, anyways . . .) will also go around offering fam tours on assorted airlines, invites for free meals as part of some launch, etcetc. But there are some amazing photographs of his trips into the more remote parts of South East Asia too, when you dig down.

HNY and stay good.

Insider said...

These mails hv been there for a long time.. hv been receiving these atleast for the last 2 yrs K. Dont bother, the PR guys will get ur mail irrespective of whether they pay 5 paise for it or just get it from the brotherhood!

Soumyadip said...

A similar database of hundreds of journalists (though not in a MS Excel format as offered by the spammer in question but updated to July 11, 2007) is publicly accessible here . The PR people would already know.

Anonymous said...

hi i stumbled on your blog today. i'm a journalist in delhi. This mail comes from a group of e-mail spam sites run by someone called murli menon and the company is called tips4ceos.com. I was so frustrated after getting approximately 100 plus mail that i took an hour, tracked down his number - i think somehere in bangalore or hyderabad - and told him pl stop spamming me. he said ok. next day same stupid mail. if you notice, they mostly use gmail ids. next time anyone gets one just hit reply with history and send a cc to abuse@gmail.com. The gmail guys block the id. But that is also not a great help because these jokers just keep creating new ids and sending their rubbish. One of these days I am going to do a story about them - hit em where it hurts and maybe they'll stop spamming us.

Anonymous said...

I have been getting the same spam email for 2 months now almost every other week. I could track this fucker down today and spoke to the spammer himself.

I realised that he wrote two books abt Zenlp and goes by the name murli menon saying in ahemdabad with his wife. This fucker own tips4ceos.com as well.

And the phone number having the ip that I cud find was 079 40061947 uses airtel broadband. (I would love to give tat number to credicard marketing people.)

I was apalled when I found that I own one of his books!!