Chess Spam

Yesterday I received the following message...

To: carnival@mark-weeks.com From: Giant Chess Subject: BIGGEST CHESS - smallest price Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:43:41 -0500 (EST) These 25 inch tall Giant Chess sets are great for schools, resorts, campgrounds, cruise ships and hotels - or your own backyard! Even if you don't play chess, these make great decorations. Made of a all-weather plastic suited for indoor or outdoor use, the chess pieces are light-weight, sturdy, and easy to move. If additional weight is desired, each piece can be filled with gravel. We recommend creating an indoor chess board using standard floor tiles or carpet squares. An outdoor board is easily created using preformed cement squares available at any do-it-yourself home store.

...as I'm sure many other chess players did. I received two more copies at my About.com email addresses. The incident would have been entirely unexceptional except for two things: 1) it's chess spam, and 2) it was sent to the email address that I use for the chess blog carnival.

My first reaction, a natural one, was to assume that the blog carnival hosts at BlogCarnival.com were selling email addresses attached to the submissions. Then a Google search on "carnival@mark-weeks.com" returned 14 hits. This reminded me that the organizer of the chess carnival used my submission as an example and posted it on various blogs and discussion groups. I don't have a problem with this and am happy to have helped in a small way, but the person responsible should have stripped out my email address.

To Whom It May Concern - DON'T POST OTHER PEOPLE'S EMAIL ADDRESSES ON THE WEB. SPAMMERS COLLECT THEM ROUTINELY AND YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO THE SPAM PROBLEM. - Thanks for your attention, Mark

I would have hoped that everyone knew that by now, but I am an eternal optimist. Twice I have been contacted by chess spammers asking for email addresses from my newsletters targeted at chess players and twice I have turned them down.

The small print at the bottom of the image says, 'NOTICE: This is a one time mailing. You have not been added to any email list, nor will you receive any further emails from us.' If I haven't been added to any email list, how did I get the message?