Just before Christmas the Gamedev.js Weekly’s email was used as the sender address to deliver some ridiculous amounts of random spam to folks who weren’t even subscribed to the actual newsletter - I’ve received hundreds of hateful replies to my inbox on December 24th.

Getting so many emails raging from ”f*ck off”, through ”I’m gonna call the police”, to ”kill yourself” was a bit too much to handle through Christmas, to say the least. This hurt a lot, even though I know they had all the right to think that replying to those emails would deliver a message to the spammers directly.

Who did this, and why? Was this particular address picked at random? Or was there someone who did this on purpose? Is this going to jeopardize the legit regular Friday issues being delivered to subscribers, since a lot of folks clicked “this is spam” on the emails supposedly originating from our newsletter’s email address? If you know the basics you can put anything in the sender field anyway, right?

I feel terrible and I’m not sure what to think about it. Maybe “this happens” and I should just carry on? The incident drained the last drops of energy I had recently.

I don’t think I’ll stop sending the newsletter issues as I haven’t missed a single one since January 2014, but this did take away all the fun I had for doing so, at least for now. Or am I just overexaggerating it?