[LINK] Do not call register suspicious messages

Tom Worthington tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Sun Mar 28 11:11:06 AEDT 2010


The Australian Communications and Media Authority sent me a reminder to
re-register my phone number with the Do Not Call Register 
<https://www.donotcall.gov.au/>. One problem with this is that it is a 
re-registration, not a renewal, that is you can't simply click a box to 
renew your existing details, you have to type it all in again. 
Presumably that helps with privacy, but also makes the process more 
cumbersome.

A more serious problem is that the reminder message looks like Spam. The
message says "Just click here: www.donotcall.gov.au" but the actual web
address linked is:
<https://promo-manager.server-secure.com/ch/ckn8pk/******/********.cfm>
(where ***** was a long number, presumably to track me).
	
This makes the message look suspicious and I almost deleted it without
responding.

ACMA should know better than to use this sort of practice in  mail 
messages. The result will be a reduction in trust of ACMA, fewer
people renewing their do not call registration and an increased risk of
Spamers fooling people that they are the real register.

The confirmation message ACMA sent also had problems. My SpamAssassin 
Spam filter, reported it has having:  HTML_MESSAGE 0.001, 
HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG 0.377,  MIME_HTML_ONLY 0.723. These were not 
enough to have the message blocked, but ACMA should compose messages 
which do not look like Spam.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890




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