Cleaning out my mailbox

I recently had a clear out of my email inbox, as I'd reached about 20,000 unread emails. As a part of this onerous task, I unsubscribed from a large number of mailing lists. Many of them were from online stores where I'd never agreed to be emailed in the first place, but a bunch of them were from conspiracy groups where I'd signed up for more information, or filled in a form to get access to a series of nonsense videos (like “The Truth About Cancer” and “GMOs Revealed”, two truly awful video series). It was obvious that several of these mailing lists I hadn't even signed up for, so I assume there's some crossover and sharing of mailing lists between these groups. There are also some groups that I've decided to still receive emails from, such as Family First and Voices for Freedom, because I think it's important to keep an eye on them.

Just after I had finished my spring clean, as I was admiring my newly cleaned out mailbox, in came a couple of random emails, destroying the serenity:

NZD-SOS

This first email is about the parody NZD-SOS website I set up last year. Someone really wants to know who's behind the site:

_from: Cloudflare Registrar no-reply@notify.cloudflare.com

to: admin@skeptics.nz

date: 6 Apr 2022, 18:06

subject: Message from someone interested in nzd-sos.com

Inquiry on your domain

Hi,

We have received the message below from someone who would like to contact you regarding nzd-sos.com. We are required by ICANN to forward these requests to you; however, you are under no obligation to respond. Should you choose to respond, please use the requestor's email address listed below. Please do not respond directly to this email.

Requestor's Name: XXXX XXXXXXXX

Requestor's Email Address: xxxx.xxxxxxxx@gmail.com

Subject: nzd-sos.com

Message: This site is spoofing another site. The domain information appears to be redacted. Kindly share the contact details under the applicable US law. Yours sincerely XXXX XXXXXXXX

The Cloudflare Registrar team_

The funny thing about this request is that I've made it very clear on the website that the NZ Skeptics are responsible. Here's the page footer:

(Speaking of the NZD-SOS site, I'd written in the newsletter a couple of months ago about how someone could theoretically write a piece of software to downvote all the articles on the site, now that they have added a simple voting mechanism to all posts. Soon after I detailed this, I noticed that the average vote for the articles on the site dropped from around 4.5 out of 5 stars to maybe 1 or 1.5. Craig noticed the other day that this mass of recent downvotes for their articles had been undone, and shortly after he mentioned it to me it looked like the downvote bot had gone into overdrive, and had started quickly downvoting all of the articles again. All this goes to show that you should never trust an online poll, even if it agrees with your position. These things are just far too easy to spam with votes.)

Astrology for Skeptics

Many years ago we ran a fun little experiment about skeptics' star signs in the NZ Skeptics' Facebook group. I wrote about the results on my personal blog, and it appears someone didn't bother to read the post properly and would like me to link my article to their astrology website, In the words of our new NZ Skeptics podcast, Yeah... Nah!

_from: Beth Simon beth.simon@saferstar.com

to: "mark@honeychurch.org" mark@honeychurch.org

date: 6 Apr 2022, 11:57

subject: Helping mark.honeychurch.org's readers check astrological compatibility with their partners

Hi there Mark

I'm one of those people that check their astrological compatibility every time they meet someone new, so I really liked your article, here: mark.honeychurch.org/blog/random/astrology/

As an astrology fanatic, I found a very detailed (and interesting) article about partner compatibility: https://www.mysticmag.com/psychic-reading/how-to-check-compatibility-partner/

This article uses astrology, tarot, attachment theory, and more to help you find the right partner. I've tried it a few times and it's worked for me so far!

I think your readers would also appreciate this article should you decide to add it to your page!

Best wishes.

Beth_