tracking sites

site being tracked without permission

[jackofalltrades]

Ive only just setup my site, and started promoting it a few days ago.

Although the site has been up for a month, the only visitors (as you can imagine) are people who ive sent the url to.

Ive checked my webstats and a site (internetseer.com) has been regularly viewing my site. On further investigation, I found that internetseer is a service that emails you if your site goes down, but requires you to register.

Ive emailed them asking for the email address of the person who submitted the url (no response yet), but ive also been told by a colleague that they may have registered me (and presumabley others) to send out spam.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Cheers

[buckworks]

You said you've been promoting your site recently. I forget which one, but Internetseer is partnered with a search engine, and when you submit your site you also get signed up with Internetseer. I suspect you opted in and didn't realize it. I've never had any mail from them other than the weekly reports, and an outage alert once. It's actually a modestly useful service in my opinion.

[gsx]

You can remove the spam by doing the following:

In mail rules (or whatever it is called in your email package):

1) If message boday contains "Free InternetSeer Web site monitoring"
2) Mark the message as read
3) Delete it

This removes all the spam they send and you still get the weekly reports and downtime reports if you want them

---

To delete all internetseer messages use the following rule:

1) If message sender contains 'InternetSeer'
2) Delete message from the server

You will have all messages from them automatically removed, they will not even be downloaded.

InternetSeer can also be signed up for automatically if you subscribe to some directories. If it is a new server/host, it can be worthwhile keeping it for a few months to see the reliability. I have seen one major UK host running at less than 80% uptime in a month. The results can be surprising.

[buckworks]

They're not garden-variety spammers, so if you don't want the reports, just unsubscribe, don't worry about all that filtering. In my experience they honor unsubscribe requests with no hiccups whatever.

[Woz]

If you submit to Claymont then you get Internetseer as a freebie.

I also find them somewhat useful as they notify you by email when your site is down rather promtly so you can figure out what is wrong and fix it, or call your host, or whatever.

As buckworks says, they do honour unsubscribes so just do that if you don't want them.

Onya
Woz

[chiyo]

We use their free service. Every week we get a report on server downtime. Very useful. I'm not sure how we got on it - I may well have registered myself. There is little to be concerned with. You will come across much more malevolent spiders!

[jackofalltrades]

Thanks one and all!

I wasnt overly concered about receiving loads of junk mail (i have a hotmail account afterall!!), it was more the principle of thing that bothered me!

As for the SE submission, I only did that last week and I was fairly selective of where I submitted my site. Internetseer has been checking out my site from pretty much the day I put it online.

But hey, ill leave it a bit and check out the reports! Cheers again for all your help (and the quick response as well!).

[CHC]

InternetSeer is the most inaccurate monitoring service in the World. Some of our hosting clients use it and it's spurious results are almost legendary. We have very little downtime indeed and regularly get outraged clients complaining that InternetSeer said that their site was down for 7 hours etc etc. On checking server logs and our own monitoring software we see 100% availability.

Could their bleak portrayal of other webhosts have anything to do with their very cozy relationship with a hosting company that they send out their pseudospam for? Along with the bogus reports of downtime they send helpful messages like "all this awful downtime tut tut, if you used our hosting partner such and such.com, you would have guaraateed uptime, blah blah blah".