[H-GEN] Re: [H-DSIG] Looking for a Boyfriend.

[Stephen Thorne]

On 17 Jul 2005 19:35:02 +1000, Russell Stuart
<russell-humbug at stuart.id.au> wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-07-17 at 16:19, Maria wrote:
> > My name is Maria and I am 22 years old.
> > I am visually impaired and live in Australia.
> > I am looking for a blind/visually impaired male penpal.
> > I like swimming, walking, cooking, reading, playing the piano,
> > watching movies and going out with friends.
> > Looking forward to hearing from you.
> 
> This looks like spam - it originated from Japan.  That
> seems weird.  Why would someone in Japan subscribe to
> the list simply to send this email?  It makes no sense,
> unless someone has written spam bot knows about mailman
> lists.  If so,
> 
> I presume someone is looking into it.  If you find out
> what happened, I would like to know.

I've recieved this kind of unsolicted email once before before, what
it looked like was a person who had a set form letter that they
copy+pasted into their email client. Just for comparisons sake, I
reproduce the text of the email:

"""
Hi Stephen,
 
Nice to meet you.
I saw your name on the web and was interested in exchanging e-mail with you.
 
I'm a 25-year-old Japanese female and my name is Hiromi SATOH.
I live with my parents in Japan.
I like listening to music, watching films, reading books and animals.
I have a 12-year-old English beagle called Alice.
I'm very interested inAustraliaand its culture.
 
Looking forward to hearing from you.
 
Hiromi
english_beagle at yahoo.com.au
"""

A nearly identical email was sent to a workmate a day later, and to
another of my own email accounts. Note that it uses my real first name
here, but when it was sent to my workmate, it just said "Hi,".

Note the similarity in composition, and the reply-to email address.
-- 
Stephen Thorne
Development Engineer