got a freaky/spam message , but wondering how come

Hi,

I am Tariq n happen to work as Unix sys admin . I joined Linux.com a couple of days ago . I got the below mail on my email i have shared with linux.com and i am pretty sure it's some spam/scam mail , what i am surprised is how come a tech portal like linux.com and I am concerned about the privacy now , not sure who all you share the info with ?? pls help .

Thx,
tariq

Hi tariq,

maureen just sent you a new message.

You can read your new message here:

http://www.linux.com/community/inbox/read?msgid=38893

Have a nice day!

NOTE: This is an auto-generated email. Please do not respond.

--
[Powered by Linux.com - For the Community, By The Community]

Hello My name is Miss maureen am 24yr old . I saw your profile today At (www.linux.com) and it really attract me a lot i believe that you are the man i have been looking for to share my love; How is your health? i hope all is well with you. I believe that we can move from here ; but remember that distance;age and color dose not matter what matters is the true love and understanding; in my next e-mail i shall include my picture; i been waiting for your reply mail me with this mail address (maureendesmond2008@hotmail.com) for further introduction. Bye hoping to hear from you soon. p Ls contact me with this mail (maureendesmond2008@hotmail.com)

10 May 10

It's definitely a spam message; I received a mail with the exact same words yesterday.

I don't think you have to worry about your privacy though, your real mail address isn't compromised. What happened was that "maureen", a registered user on the forums, used the "Write Message" function in your profile to contact you, and the forums then forwarded this message to your real mail address.

If you really want to, I think this function might be disabled in the Privacy Settings of your profile.

10 May 10

Jabir is correct, that is a general spam message that unfortunately does not raise the necessary flags with the spam filter. It did not in any way compromise your privacy because your information is not available to the outside users if you did not choose for it to be in the privacy settings.

If you want you can change the "Able to receive private messages" option in the Privacy options to stop all private messages from being received, or you can report the message as spam to help our spam heuristics system to better detect these messages and get the user rejected from the site.

12 May 10

Wow. i got the exact same message today too

12 May 10

My profile is set to "friends", which is probably the reason why I didn't receive the email. Recently I've been checking to see how my privacy settings are managed by each site that I have signed up for. I've been doing this ever since Google launched "buzz". It was sort of a wakeup call.
While I'm very careful with privacy settings, I noticed that some of my identi.ca dents were being posted on some other sites, so, as I would advise all of you, go back and check privacy settings, not just here on Linux.com, but everywhere else you've opened an account.

13 May 10

When you get spam like this in your private message list, report it. I have received some similar in the past. Some idiots never learn that these forums are pretty good at self-policing, and if the moderators are informed of this sort of misbehavior by users, they will deal with it accordingly.

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