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[alexandertnt]

I opened up my email, and found 3 junk emails from "webmaster@bay12forums.com".

They each have 4 links to websites with trash names (eg ubwskaoige.com)

Yahoo shows them as from: "trash@trash.com <webmaster@bay12forums.com>" ("trash" being whatever random string of letters you can imagine).

Has anyone seen something like this or know anything about it?

[Vucar Fikodastesh]

I received two of these yesterday.

Spoiler: Email (click to show/hide)

Personally, I think hukeymodyrrm.com wouldn't be that bad of a name for a website.

[Urist Imiknorris]

I sense there will be blood in the future. Digital blood. All Toady needs is a two-threaded sword and it will happen.

[Cthulhu]

Someone's using the forum email feature for spam.  If you send an email via that little email box, instead of showing their email address it sends them via webmaster@bay12forums.com

Turn off the receive email from forum users option.  It's not like anyone uses that feature anyway.

[smjjames]

I haven't gotten that myself, but its definetly something Toady needs to check out.

[forsaken1111]

Just checked and saw that 3 of these have been marked as spam and blocked. hah

[Toady One]

Janus and I have been trying to work on a fix for this.  SMF doesn't make it very easy, unfortunately.  Unchecking "Allow users to email me" in Account Settings should stop the problem.  One of you already had this box unchecked -- if that wasn't a result of Cthulhu's post or something that happened recently, please send me a PM, as that would mean the email didn't originate from the forum, which would be a different matter.

If one of you has a recent one (as in today), I should be able to check the log for it if you have the specific email that appears before "webmaster@bay12forums.com" (the random strings of letters).  The spammers are changing their emails, but the log should have the account id.

[Toady One]

Double post for emphasis:  Okay, if you get one of these now, it should give the forum user's displayed name in the email subject, like "From forum user <name> : <email subject>".  They can't change their displayed name, so if in fact these are coming from the forum, this should be a way to catch them.  We're still looking for a way to shut down this functionality altogether, since it seems so abusable.

[Vucar Fikodastesh]

One of you already had this box unchecked -- if that wasn't a result of Cthulhu's post or something that happened recently, please send me a PM, as that would mean the email didn't originate from the forum, which would be a different matter.

Yeah, I unchecked that after reading Cthulhu's post. I'll try checking again it to see if I get another one of these.

[Toady One]

Ah, cool.  I was worried.  We've also patched up a problem where the warning it gives you about not being able to send two emails within 75 seconds of each other was actually given to the member *after* it sends the second email -- so a spammer could in fact send as many emails as they want.  It should be way easier to catch these guys now, and it should be clearer to people receiving these things what is going on now with the new subject line.