Chuck's Blog

In my last post about Fanbox I wrote about how I tried the whole unsubscribe option on their site, since I noted it is supposedly a legit site. So far, so good. It’s been nearly a month, and I still haven’t received any new messages from them.

So, for future reference for anyone, unsubscribing from Fanbox DOES work. Though if your having a domain-wide problem, (Eg, many users getting the spam) it’s still pretty feasible to block the domain on an SMTP level, rather than individually unsubscribe the addresses.

For the past few months I have been receiving annying junk messages from the domain ‘fanboxnotes.com’ After a few quick Google searchs I determined that while there is a fanbox website, it seemingly uses spam tactics to sign up members.

I also discovered that by in any way using the fanbox link automaticly creates you an account on the site; what ever happened to real registration!?! And to make things even more annoying it supposedly takes at least 24hrs to remove the account.

While I know it is generally a BAD idea to click on links in spam messages, I figured the first message I got was legit due to a friend of mine signing up. Now it appears I have alot of fan’s on the site, according to the several messages a day, which is rather annoying.

I don’t know if unsubscribing yourself from the site would work, for most spam messages it does the opposite, but since it was a ‘legit’ domain I gave it a try. I don’t really care whether it works or not — if it doesn’t I’ll just block the domain anyway.

Anyway, here’s key headers from the e-mail’s:

Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of NOREPLY@fanboxnotes.com designates
 208.69.97.54 as permitted sender) client-ip=208.69.97.54;

Precedence: bulk

X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.3 required=5.0 tests=AWL,HTML_MESSAGE,
	MIME_HTML_ONLY,NO_REAL_NAME autolearn=no version=3.1.7-deb3

EDIT: See here for a followup to this post.