Bloody spammers

If you are subscribed to a GNOME mailing list, you probably got a really long and off-topic email from me. Except it wasn't me who sent it.

Yesterday, I was spending a nice evening enjoying some good home-made sushis, and when I went back home, I was really surprised to see lots of emails about waking up the world, meeting the new boss, ... And I got very annoyed when I realized that these emails had been sent from my email address to most GNOME mailing lists existing on earth. I felt really bad when I saw some replies showing that some people thought this email really originated from me. So I did the only thing I could do, some limited damage control. I replied to the persons who mailed me directly and to a few select mailing lists to make it perfectly clear that this mail didn't originate from me despite what it seemed.

By looking at the headers of the email, it's quite clear (at least to me) that I didn't send it: it was sent from a US ISP and I'm living in France these days and mainly using gmail as a mailer. Moreover, careful readers of the email (I haven't even read it myself ;) will have noticed that this email is signed "david duke" which is not my name ;).

I think some guy box was taken over by a trojan and that it crawled gnome.org mailing list archives, got my email address from there and gathered the addresses of most mailing GNOME lists and then blindly spammed them. I sent an email to the abuse contact of the ISP, but I don't really expect too much from them.

Now you know about as much as I do about that embarrassing email that some spam bot sent impersonating me. If you know people who got this email and think it was really from me, please spread the word and let them know that I had nothing to do with that. I'd never sent some political email to dozens of mailing lists where it's off-topic, especially not a really controversial one like this one.

That's all folks, let's go back to hack now :)