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9:11pm August 12, 2014

So, I unthinkingly replied to a weird email

feliscorvus:

…and I really hope it doesn’t lead to anything bad happening. :/ It was really early, and the message *appeared* to come from someone with an actual name at a legitimate domain. All they said was basically “are you the person who writes [blog]?”, so I wrote back saying something like “yeah I used to but I’m too busy to update nowadays”. 

I don’t see how that kind of reply could give them anything they could use against me, if that’s their goal, but still…I feel terribly foolish for not looking at the header info BEFORE I replied. It only occurred to me to check the header *after* replying (and suddenly getting a weird “uh-oh” feeling), and sure enough, it was a spoofed address coming through the same anonymizer I’d previously gotten a bunch of strange crap from.

Again, I’m prepared to accept that this is all some kind of semi-automated spam business, and more accidental than personal. As noted when I last wrote about this situation, one of my partner’s relatives had their account hacked shortly before I began receiving the weirdness, and while everyone involved subsequently changed all their passwords, it’s possible something was “set in motion”. 

I know I shouldn’t obsess over this too much but it’s like…there’s *just* enough of a whiff of something personal that I keep being compelled to try and figure out WTF it is. Or if it’s part of a pattern. And it’s disturbing to me that NO ONE who I try and describe this to has any clue what I’m talking about. They’ve never seen anything like it before. It doesn’t fit any known spammer behavior pattern OR any coherent troll behavior pattern. And *that*’s the aspect that’s driving me up several walls — the whole “there’s a pattern here, I think, but I haven’t been able to characterize it yet”. It’s like staring at something that *might* be one of those Magic Eye pictures but not being able to figure out if you’re wasting your time or if some 3-D shark is going to pop out at any moment. So if anyone has ever seen anything remotely like this, PLEASE let me know, I would be so grateful to learn, at least, that this isn’t some freakish custom-tailored low-level harassment campaign. 

It makes me a little worried that it’s about me.