Adverts I looked at yesterday are appearing on my Linuxmail account tonight! How ? ?

bofatbot · 04-27-2011, 04:40 PM

I have recently found that adverts I have looked at on Gumtree are appearing on my Linuxmail email account.
Yesterday I looked at several adverts for cars. Today, namely 10 minutes ago, these adverts appeared as 1" x 1" pictures with an invite to " Click " to see more.
How is this happening ?
I always use " clear recent history " when browsing. All the boxes are ticked for log ins, cookies etc etc.
This may be the wrong section to post this question, but I feel that it is a security issue !

Thanks in anticipation,

Bof.

Noway2 · 04-27-2011, 06:36 PM

Just to be clear, you were looking at advertisements for cars and now you are receiving EMAILS advertising the same cars?
Are you certain you did not provide any information to these sites? Did you subscribe to any other information services in regards to cars?

As far as being a potential security issue, one possibility that I can think of, though it would be somewhat remote is: do you run your own email server from the same public IP that you were looking at these advertisements? If so, it is possible that they collected your IP address and detected that you have a mail exchanger at that IP and sent stuff to it. If you do run a mail server on this public IP, do you have an MX record (not that it would matter too much)?