[LINK] Fwd: Confirmation

[Markus Buchhorn]

At 13:45 28/04/2003 +1000, Roger Clarke wrote:
>So it presents as a genuine 'I'm suffering from spammers and have worked out an elegant way to deal with it' kind of message.
>
>But is it an example of refined spam, causing (a sufficient number of) recipients to accept it as a justifiable intrusion into their mailbox, have their interest piqued, and visit the site?

I've recently had two almost identical social-engineering "not-spam, opt-in, I've been caught by spammers" messages, from different sources, again with reasonably valid email headers and addresses/websites. The language was basically identical to yours. I did get messages from the supposedly-opt-in lists for several days before the 'apology'.

The fundamental question I'd have is why would spammers bother subscribing you to some third-party list?? Seems remarkably generous of them to promote somebody else's product that they have no interest in.... :-)

Markus