On March 4 we wrote about FanBox being the new Plaxo in that the site regularly spammed users. Further the opt-out process for emails was unduly complicated to the point of being unusable. I was approached by FanBox’s PR firm last week who told me they wanted to line up a meeting with the CEO so they could put their story forward. I naturally presumed that I would be spun but to be fair I’d listen to what they had to say. So this morning I get on a conference call with them, complete with WebEx presentation. It lasted 5 minutes. They immediately said that they were in the wrong and that having read the comments from TechCrunch readers they are changing their email process. Receive an email from FanBox, click on the opt out option, and you get a screen similar to the one pictured. Selecting Never and Save means no more emails from FanBox. They did explain that as they are building a social platform that users can contact other users, however you can opt out of that as well. Third party applications; not a problem either, simple opt-out process. They even thanked TechCrunch’s commenters for giving them the feedback prior to their official launch so that they could act on it. A big thumbs up for FanBox for listening. → Read More
San Diego based FanBox from mobile solutions company SMS.ac offers a variety of services. From its front page it offers a reasonable web desktop package, complete with wordprocessing, IM and online storage. A social networking service is included, and the holding company sms.ac offers premium SMS services. It sounds like a run of the mill package, except that like Plaxo in the past, FanBox spams potential signups by accessing the address books of its registered users. At least that’s what others have said, however I don’t recognize any of the names in the spam I’m now regularly receiving from the service, so it may well just be broad scale spamming of anyone and everyone. I couldn’t find a lot of history on the company (in particular who bankrolled it). According to Wikipedia, Sms.ac was founded in 2001 and has over 50 million registered users worldwide. As an SMS provider the company has been accused of spamming people in the past, and a search of our archives found mention of the company in the comment threads on the Plaxo spam posts. FanBox has been spamming people from at least the middle of last year. A search for “FanBox spam” in Google gives 5710 hits. The spam from FanBox comes in a number of forms: Registration Spam You receive an email informing you that you’ve signed up for Fanbox and to click on the link to retrieve your password Fan spam [name]@Fanbox wants to be your loyal fan Hi [name from your email] I’d note in my case it’s always my gmail account name, which isn’t my actual name but my company name Yvonna@ FanBox wants to be your loyal fan! Automatically sign in to view Yvonna@ FanBox’s profile and/or photo, and accept or reject her fan request. Question spam Subject: Karen has asked you a question on FanBox Karen asked you a question. View the question and answer it. Following the link usually takes you to a really vague and random question, like “Would you tell a lie if you knew it would not hurt anyone?” Others have recommended that you should not click on FanBox links and most definitely not give them log in details for your email service. It’s wise advice. To be fair though they are not the only people spamming my inbox at the moment, I still haven’t got around to blocking emails from Facebook apps, but → Read More
San Francisco, CA
