Hello,

This is David Crabill from Forrager. Recently (sometime on Monday), you received a spam message that came from Forrager, and I just wanted to say that I am very sorry that happened. This is the worst spam attack Forrager has had, and I am looking into ways to make sure it doesn't happen again.

In case it wasn't clear, you should not respond to "Mara" by clicking on links in the email, or by sending an email to the email address in the message. From what I can tell, this was a "soft" spam message, meaning that no viruses were contained in any links. Most likely, the intent was to collect email addresses by getting you to send them an email to their Hotmail address, which would then expose your email address to them.

Unless you sent an email to the attacker's Hotmail address, your email address was not exposed to them. Also, the attacker did not get any of your personal data. In truth, Forrager itself was not hacked: rather, someone signed up as a malicious user and sent these messages by abusing the private message system on Forrager. I have now blacklisted the bad user account, and you will not get pestered by that user again.

Thanks to those of you who responded to the email to let me know about the attack. Unfortunately, I was off at an event on Monday, so I couldn't address this immediately, and by the time I got home, I found that hundreds of spam emails had been sent! I helped a company deal with this kind of attack a few years ago, and let's just say it's never fun. I appreciate your patience!

Could you do me a favor? Please do NOT mark that message as spam in your email system. If you mark it as spam, your email system will start to put legitimate messages from Forrager into spam in the future. Instead, it's safe to simply delete the message; or, if you have already marked it as spam, then change it to "not spam" and then delete it. This way, you will let your email system know that you want messages from Forrager in the future (in fact, an update is coming later this week). Thank you!

Please let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything I can help with. You can simply reply to this email to reach me.

David