Email communication, though integral to the functioning of craigslist,
leaves us open to spammers, scammers, and worms.
We devote a LOT of time and energy to combatting these evils, but it's a
never-ending battle.
If you're seeing a new outbreak, please let us know at spam@craigslist.org. If you have ideas on how we can do a better job, please drop by our feedback forum.
Here are some recent examples:
- Nigerian Financial Scam (6/19): someone harvested email addresses from
craigslist postings, and sent a poorly written financial con/scam to them.
We're now working with the people at the email reply-to address to
identify the scammers. (This may or may not bear fruit.)
- Klez worm (ongoing since early 2002): Microsoft Outlook worm/virus that
confusingly spoofs the "from" address. We've set up our email servers to prevent virus/worm email relaying. As always, be wary of unknown attachments, and if you are a Windows user, keep your anti-virus software up-to-date.
- Professional email harvesters and spammers (ongoing): These creeps make a living harvesting and selling email addresses off the internet, including craigslist. We contact them and ask them to stop, then send cease-and-desist letters (may start publishing these on the site), and may end up taking them to court if they persist.
- Commercial website spammers (intermittent): generally they take email addresses from craigslist postings, then send "we're better than craigslist, why don't you use us instead" messages. Craig generally calls these people and shames them into stopping. We've tuned our email relay system to block spammers who attempt to broadcast a message to lots of our anonymized posting addresses.
Still have questions? try our
help desk discussion forum or
send us a note.