MobileMe URLs are a spammer's delight

Posted on 22 Aug 2008 at 11:39

It’s so obvious that it’s surprising that no-one has brought it to the wider public’s notice until now. Apple’s MobileMe URL structure makes it very easy to spam subscribers to the company’s suite of online services.

All public MobileMe web addresses share a common factor — the user’s MobileMe account name which just happens to be the first part of their email address. Whether it’s web.mac.com for iWeb sites, gallery.mac.com for photo collections or idisk.mac.com for Public iDisk folders, all three contain the full username.

So for spammer, it is simply a question of scanning the web for MobileMe locations, garnering the usernames, adding @me.com or @mac.com and every MobileMe subscriber is on their spam list.

Apple is said to be aware of the issue, but according to an email sent to one subscriber, does not consider it to be significant.

“We’ve never had a complaint from a customer about people spamming them because of their iDisk public folder name,” the Apple representative said, adding that, “There is no way to remove your account name from the iDisk folders. I’m very sorry.”

Author: Simon Aughton

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