Mail Bug

[pooms]

I just received an HTML mail message from my ISP which contains this bug:

<IMG src="http://email.telus.com/cgi-bin1/flosensing?y=PKx0DxcWD0DUd0Bo">

a quick Google search on "flosensing" shows up a number of sites using
this CGI program, so I think it is a good candidate for the kill list.

I'm also not to happy that other links in the email show up like this:

<A class=lightgrey
   href="http://email.telus.com/cgi-bin1/flo?y=hPKx0DxcWD0DUd0FGFj0As">TELUS
            Privacy Commitment</A>

So the URL contains an identifier that has a core part in common with the identifier
sent to the mail bug. I'm just guessing, but if that part of the identifier
is unique for each person the mail is sent to, this would
allow them to correlate my email address with the fact that I clicked on
a link. In the above example, ironically, it is a link to their "Privacy
Commitment"!!!

Now I could be wrong, and the identifier is the same for everyone who got
the email, so I'm going to ask a few friends to send me copies they received.

 

[hpguru]

Are you positive it is from your ISP? I recieved a few pieces of spam that appeared to be from my ISP until I examined the headers more closely.

Facing each other,
a thousand miles apart.

Edited by - hpguru on 24 Jun 2002  02:54:56

[pooms]

It's definitely from my ISP and a friend forwarded me the copy that they got
and the ID's definitely change. But thanks for the suggestion of checking
the headers, as from that I could see that on the way to me it went through
flonetwork.com. After a little searching in Google I found out that Flonetwork
is a company which has been acquired by DoubleClick and is an "email marketing"
company. Here's a bit of a description of the product:
http://ezine-tips.com/list-tips/list-resources/20000204.shtml
Obviously my ISP uses their product.


 

[hpguru]

Well anyway thanks for the heads up! I just added both those to my hosts file.

Facing each other,
a thousand miles apart.