Scam alert: [Fwd: Thank you from One Laptop per Child]

[Hal Murray]

> I got an email that claimed to be from negroponte at laptop.org asking
> for help with G1G1 but all the links were not to where they said they
> were from. I think it may be phishing or a scam of some sort.  For
> example, the link to amazon.com/XO actually goes to: 

If you look at the Received headers you will probably find that it came from 
something like ccm01.constantcontact.com

Constant Contact is one of the big ESPs (Email Service Providers).  They 
handle mailing lists for other people and generally do a better job than most 
people would do by themselves.


> http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?...

If you poke around with whois, you will see that rs6.net is owned by Constant 
Contact.

That particular URL will bounce through their system and off to Amazon.  The 
idea is that they count clicks.  Marketers love that sort of data so 
companies like CC provide it.

A variation is 1x1 gifs, often called web bugs.  That lets them count how 
many people opened the mail even if they don't click on any of the links.  
That assumes you enable html in your mail reader and that you enable gifs and 
...

I'm not sure why they use rs6 (or similar) rather than constantcontact.  I 
think I saw an explanation once, but I don't have enough marketing blood in 
me for it to make sense.

I'm a privacy nut.  I hate tracking.  I consider it to be rude at best.

I don't know if CC is setup to disable tracking if their customers ask about 
it.


-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.