[Cialug] Weird Spam Experience

[Todd Walton]

I had a weird thing happen to me. Here a couple of months ago I started
receiving emails from a group of people in England to my Gmail address. It
was a distribution list of co-workers associated with
galleriesofjustice.org.uk, though not all were from there. "Hey everyone,
congrats on finishing that project", "Anyone up for beers after work
today?", etc. My usual way of dealing with suddenly receiving emails like
this is to just ignore it. That usually works, believe it or not, but
wasn't working this time. After about a month and a half of getting these
emails once every couple of days I decided to respond.

On the 4th of this month I replied to one of the emails, to just the
sender. It wasn't a "reply all". I said to this lady, "Can you please
remove me from your distribution list?  I don't think I'm the guy you
want.  I've never even been to England." She said, "Yes of course,
apologies I took this off a group distribution list so I'm not sure how you
managed to get on it. I will arrange for you to be removed."

Within a couple of hours I started receiving a deluge of spam for things
like secret shopper stuff, great coupon deals, surveys for money, lotto
stuff, etc. They all refer to me as "Timothy" and seem like grey-market
stuff. Not actual phishing or scams, but not the kind of stuff anyone
knowingly signs up for. I've *never* gotten this kind of thing in my Gmail
inbox before. Gmail has fantastic spam filtering. So I marked it all as
spam and Gmail said "Got it", but it's still coming in. I keep marking it
as spam but it keeps coming in.

Some questions come to mind:

1) How did this happen?
2) How did Gmail not catch the spam?
3) Why does it continue to not catch it?

--
Todd