It is time to take my own medicine I suppose. There are a lot of things which can go wrong when you analyze Spam and Phishing emails and this one thing, I did wrong drives me nuts.
I talk about this
Somebody has been so kind to sign one of my email addresses up for a dating site. From the “email-to” I can at least say that it wasn’t me, as the email in use misses the “.” I always use in my Gmail address.
So, the problem is that I rasterize all the URLs within an email and naturally it also rasterized the verification URL, which for the site owner is similar to me clicking the button.
Bottom line, be careful, if you are analyzing emails and you rasterize the URLs it could have an unwanted side effect, especially when users forward their spam and phishing to you, as you could easily sign them up for even more spam and phishing.
Since this infamous click I have now received 94 emails, well at least it seems I am popular with the ladies 🙂