Personal Branding Gets Dark

There are certain watersheds in life where everything on the other side is bigger than you thought it could be. Marriage counts (the first time, at least), as do substantive public service and hard-earned sobriety, but the undisputed heavyweight among watersheds is puberty. Adult drives suddenly push you into a kind of waking anxiety nightmare, then, when you're old enough, towards fun things that you'll never tell your grandmother about.

I hadn't expected a modicum of online writing success to be any kind of watershed. I thought I'd simply carry on posting as if nobody was reading, and that interesting stuff only happened to the big guys. Alas, regular readers will know that I picked up my first imitator recently - someone's pretending to be me and publishing rubbish articles (or at least, worse ones) - and to be honest, I was kind of chuffed to be worth copying. In the weeks since, however, things have become less fun, starting with a Frenchman calling me a word Brits use all the time but Americans, I learned on a visit there, are generally against.

He complained that I'd sent him spam. I hadn't, of course, but someone pretending to be me had sent him some imagery with suspect links. I checked through my accounts to make sure they hadn't been compromised and took a closer look at the message he'd been sent, hoping to see how my email address had been spoofed... and it hadn't been.

The attack was far simpler than that. The spammer had set up an @live email address using my name and then set the reply-to address as my actual email. Essentially, he sent the message from an email he controlled (albeit with my name) and routed the replies to me. I had no idea that could be done and was miffed to learn that you can't stop anyone from doing it.

Right now, for instance, you could set your boss's email address as the reply-to for your messages, send out a bunch of nasty emails from your own account, and your boss will get the expletive-laden replies. You could even use the Pope's email address, if you have it, or the King of Spain's. And you don't need any fancy tools from dank parts of the web to make this happen - all the big email providers have this functionality baked in. Just a couple of clicks on Gmail, and you're good to go. Infuriating.

Spammers use this easily-available functionality to fool filters into thinking their messages are legitimate. The idea is that an email with a reputable reply-to address is probably good, so the spam filters won't activate. Thankfully, it's not foolproof - lots of spam gets caught - but it worked for this spammer against an email provider in France, and I got some insults thrown at me in French. The next piece of charlatanry was worse.

About a week later, some clown (or the same one) used my email address as the reply-to address and pasted the content of my welcome email into his spam message. The theory behind this gambit is that since my welcome message is sent out to thousands of people, spam filters will recognise emails containing it as legitimate, even though, again, the sender was obviously not me. And again, this is easy to do and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Double infuriating.

I don't see why this kind of thing can't be stopped. Surely I ought to be able to dictate which senders can use my email address as their reply-to and limit that permission to - let's think about what makes sense here - just me because it's my sodding email address!

But, if there really isn't an Earthly way of tackling this kind of thing, perhaps some eternal damnation can be hoped for - the acid pits of Tartarus, maybe? Or, failing that, might the spammers spend eternity feeling the angst and anxiety of early puberty, only without the vitality? As old men, perhaps?

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