[tmbchr]™

The Night of the Phantom Emails



Just wondering if anybody out there has been trying to contact me through the contact form on my website and having problems with it? Over the last 24 hours, I’ve gotten an unusually large number of phantom emails with blank contents and there were a few last night with gobbledegook in them. If you’re having trouble with it, contact me in the comments below. Otherwise, I’m starting to wonder if somebody’s just fucking with me, if there’s some malicious (hacking) intent behind these repeated attempts, or if maybe some weird internet spirit is trying to communicate with me. I once knew a guy who told me in all seriousness that he got a spam email from a fake address using the same name as a friend of his who had just died.







14 Reader Responses

  1. albion Says:
    August 24th, 2005 at 1:36 am

    must be the djinn.

  2. Fell Says:
    August 24th, 2005 at 1:49 am

    This is the point where Tim’s occult research takes a turn for the worse. Phantasms… Wendigo… Demons… Methed out goth kids playing too many RPGs…

    Let’s all sit back and enjoy the show!

  3. garrett kelly Says:
    August 24th, 2005 at 1:56 am

    what happens to our emails after we die?

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 24th, 2005 at 11:34 am

    Garrett, I’ve seen companies that deal with that somehow. I forget the set-up. There are also places that go and preserve the websites of people who die as memorials. I’ll look around for it.

  5. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 24th, 2005 at 11:36 am

    Here are a couple items on it:

    http://www.urlwire.com/news/111003.html
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4164669.stm

  6. J. Puma Says:
    August 24th, 2005 at 12:54 pm

    forget the djinn– this is skynet, baby! were any of them from a gmail account?

    reminds me of a period in my life where i was getting lots and lots of ‘blank’ phonecalls. i’d get like 8-10 a day (on average, sometimes more, sometimes less) for like three or four months, even after i moved from one apt. to another. i still wonder what that was all about.

  7. segovius Says:
    August 25th, 2005 at 3:36 am

    I have been plagued by this for the last two days also - as has my partner on a different account.

    Any ideas yet?

  8. segovius Says:
    August 25th, 2005 at 3:37 am

    I have been plagued by this for the last two days also - as has my partner on a different account.

    Any ideas yet?

  9. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 25th, 2005 at 11:12 am

    Oh really? That’s totally strange. It finally stopped for me.

  10. segovius Says:
    August 25th, 2005 at 12:34 pm

    Stopped for me too - I think it was a bot that was trying something funny. Mine were all from nobody@’myownhostname’.

    My hosts are looking into it.

  11. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 25th, 2005 at 12:35 pm

    YEAH that’s what mine was also! was your using a contact form on your site?

  12. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 25th, 2005 at 12:39 pm

    Do you think I should alert my host about it?

  13. segovius Says:
    August 26th, 2005 at 5:48 am

    Hi Tim, yes, it was through a form. I got a reply from my hosts - it seems spammers were trying to hijack my mail script to send out their spam. It didn’t work in my case because of the way I had configured the form - the ‘nobody’ is a tag when it is not a real user.

    I would definitely get in touch with your hosts because if they have managed to hijack your mail people will be getting spam that seems to come from you.

  14. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 26th, 2005 at 11:05 am

    Thanks, Segovius. I contacted my host about it and am waiting to hear back.



SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STRENGTH.