Sponsored by..

Monday 16 February 2009

UNYK.com: spam or what?

I really, really hate these contact managers that spam out invites to everyone's contacts. UNYK.com seems to be the latest of these:

Subject: Personal invitation from ****************

Hello,

This is a way to never lose contact.

Finally, a smart and simple way to manage your contacts!

With UNYK, I put all my contacts together in one address book that is automatically updated. One of my contacts changes his or her information at UNYK.com: My address book is updated. I change information at UNYK.com: My contacts’ address books are updated. Simple, but life-changing!

Can I add you as one of my contacts? To accept, click here!

You too can create your own smart address book.

Life-changing my arse.. Plaxo has been doing this for years and that's a pretty worthless application to.

If you are a corporate mail administrator, then my advice has always been to block this kind of rubbish. As you might expect, it comes with some downloads that you probably don't want to let anywhere near your users' PCs, and it is bound to generate a load of support calls asking "is this spam?" / "this looks like a good idea, doesn't it?" / "is this a virus?" / "how do I install this?" etcetera.

No, I'm not saying that UNYK.com is evil in any way, it is just that for many sysadmins this sort of stuff costs real money when the users latch onto it. The best thing to do is apply an IP block to 204.92.8.159 to 204.92.8.220, and hopefully you will never be bothered by UNYK.com again.

2 comments:

Allen said...

I love that they're called unyk [eunoch].

Bowie Mike said...

I sent an e-mail from my home computer to my brother last night. He got the e-mail and he got the same e-mail that you described above. The second e-mail said that it was from me, and invited him to "Click Here," but I've never signed up for that service. Any thoughts on how that spam is being generated as if it was coming from me?