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Spam Research Six Month Report
Zoomer writes "Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as 'spam.' Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address? In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam." Update: 04/12 15:47 GMT by CN : About a minute after this went live, I found that michael posted this earlier. Mea culpa.
you can't just put your email address on your website like you once did
you can't add your email address to your usenet posts
even if you email someone and they get an email virus, then you're on every spam list this side of Mars faster than you can say kazaa
spam is harrasment, spam is bad, spam is undermining the internet. What would my mother think if she suddenly received "cum see horny l0litas" just because someone she emailed got a virus
Legally treat spammers like vandals I say.
PS if anybody needs some good spam to help Mozilla Bayesian Junk Mail filters learn, just set up a Hotmail account and copy those e-mails into Mozilla :)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/19/173624 9
atleast this one is in html form, not pdf.
I saw it in the Mysterious Future, but there still isn't a good way to report dupes before they go live. I think you should open the thread for comments before it goes live, and nuke/archive/whatever those comments after it's live.
This story was already posted 2 weeks ago.
This still doesnt solve the spam problem. Do I have to start using the web different to avoid 50 spams a day?
.... E-mail addresses composed of short names and initials like bob@ or tse@, or basic combinations like smithj@ or toms@ will probably receive more spam. E-mail addresses need not be incomprehensible, but a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org.
Anybody see the irony in that?
I've got roughly 2500 spam emails....
They mentioned that no spam was received from emails listed in the WHOIS database...
I'd be interested in seeing a study for companies that harvest snail mail addresses from the database.
I've received junk snail mail from every shady company on the face of the planet when I register a new domain or when it's up for renewal...plus I've even received phone calls (back when I used a real phone) about "we're ready to setup your web hosting and web design. Call us back immediately!" Persistant bugger, too...he kept calling back.
It's interesting to see those results. While I knew that spammers
harvested e-mail addresses from Web Sites, I didn't realize the
magnitude of it.
of the 10,000 spam messages they received over the six month period,
8,609 of them were from simply posting it publicly to a web site. I
always opt out of the subscription services where I can, and most of
the time I avoid posting any of my e-mail addresses publicly, now I
will redouble that effort.
They had some really useful suggestions also, my favorite was using
multiple "disposable" e-mail addresses and forwarding them to a main
e-mail address that you keep private. When you sign up for a site,
create a new disposable e-mail address and use that. If you start
getting spam from it, just shut off that disposable e-mail. That is
incredibly good advice.
I like the idea of disguising or masking your e-mail address,
although I think using HTML characters or a "Human readable"
equivalent is something that spammers will easily be able to
circumvent if the practice becomes widespread. They don't bother now
because not many people do it.
What I would like to see is a standard practice of generating your
posted e-mail address into an image. This would make it
*significantly* more difficult to harvest e-mail addresses in mass,
while remaining easy for a single use of sending someone an e-mail message.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
...tell the wrong person on slashdot that he's a blithering idiot.
How about a "dupe" category on slashdot? That way the editors could mark stories as dupes and users could filter the category.
400 spam emails in the period of 2-apr upto 12 - apr. That's 40 a day. My spamfilters can cope with that, but it is annoying.
What I don't understand is how it is financially still possible. Someone has to pay the bill for the used bandwidth/server usage..
I'm happy to get all of this spam because it increases the effectiveness of my anti-spam system Herbivore. Herbivore is a distributed anti-spam system. Everybody that uses it increases it's accuracy. If you're interested, any Slashdot readers can get two years for free by entering "slashdot" as the promotional code. Help us fight spam!
FFS, STFU.
Besides, his recommendation is for the average user--that is, WITHOUT SpamAssassin running on their mail server.
We might look at this from a different perspective, if we eliminate all spam the 'penis enlargement' and 'hot barely legal lolitas that want you!' industries might collapse overnight.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I recently registred a new e-mail adress, two days later I already had spam in my inbox. I noticed that I had been releasing my e-mail on a few web-pages, and came to think of something. The spammers "scan" webpages for e-mail addresses, and automaticly send commercial mail to them.
If you are sick of this - as I am - add your e-mail address with NOSPAM in the middle of it like name@NOSPAMhost.com, or write it like this; name at host dot com. I have started doing that, and as I can see spam has acually increased a little bit.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Deja vu?
a. CmdrTaco
b. michael
c. RFC EVIL BIT
d. CowboyNeal's dupes
e. The CowboyNeal Option
If the 'net wasn't clogged with articles about spam, more bandwidth would be saved than if spam itself was eliminated. These are a waste of reading time. We all know the best techniques to get rid of spam, yet our news sources are cluttered with spam complaints and recommendations. Am I the only one thinking this?
What I would like to see is a standard practice of generating your posted e-mail address into an image.
This would shut out people with less acute vision and would shut you out from contracting for the U.S. government.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Spam" ought to be CmdrTaco's category to update all by himself. It appears to be some weird obsession with him, since most people in his position just use one of the many freely-available tools and live with it.
Spam, the religion of CmdrTaco, who will soon declare SpamJihad on the troll community here, unleashing his SpamFedaykin-Slashbots! SPAM!
Mailshell.com tells me who spams me. You can assign yourself a "new" email address anytime, just by making it up when you give it to someone. The fake email is forwarded to your real address. So I have addresses like amazon@me.mailshell.com, etc. You can also direct any email that comes from a particular address to the trash, and never see it. I like it, I don't think it's too expensive. When I signed on it was still free.
This still doesn't tell us WHERE spam comes from... i.e. what kind of losers are distributing it. Havent they realised that spam is now an ineffective advertising method? If someone wants pr0n, they damn where know where to get it. They're not just going to one day say "Oh, I think I will 'try' pr0n just because I got an email about it" as someone would try a car if they saw an ad on TV...
OR perhaps spam doesnt come from any one person - perhaps its the beginning of a dormant AI within the internet that nobody sees, it creates these messages on its own free will, and will some day break out of the internet.... okay, maybe i HAVE been watching the Matrix Trailer too much..
.... is the profile of the average spammer. Most of my spam is poorly spelled and frequently points to sites that don't have anything to sell. My suspicion, and I have no way of verifying it, is that most of these messages are sent by people who get suckered into a "Make Money From Home!" offer, send a few messages to a giant list of addresses, and then give up when they're not living in MC Hammer's mansion by the end of the week.
Does anyone know who the average spammer is?
Another cool piece of spam research I've never seen mentioned on Slashdot is the Bot Trap, which I learned about from this Little Green Footballs entry. If you're the admin for any web server, I strongly recommend setting this up. You probably don't make a huge dent in spam, but you get the satisfaction of seeing the list of IP's you thwarted.
grep -ri 'should work'
We found that posting our contact email addresses on a well known website was definitely the worst thing to do. There are some very aggressive email harvesters out there that just eat up website content and easily parse out the email addresses. Using some simple javascript tricks to assemble and display your email address piece by piece will defeat the current generation of harvesters.
Some of our old email accounts are now firmly planted in the email lists that these companies sell to each other and will "be in play" forever. Having received numerous offers to assemble and sell email lists (which we will never do), I know a little about these companies. Once your email is known by one of the big players, it will be sold to others in units of thousands for as little as pennies but sometimes up to a buck per thousand.
The /. effect on webservers. Obviously starting with their own.
Another method I have seen used effectively is creating an image file (.gif,
I use the image technique whenever I put my email address on any of my pages.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
A week later, spam to my hotmail account has dropped from 30 or so a day to about 2. (Warning: Hotmail support is only provided in the pay version, but there's a 30-day trial.) Preview the spam on the server, and you're able to delete it, blacklist it, and best of all, bounce it back to the sender. In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work so well. YMMV.
Another kick-ass product is Spam Gourmet. Some website wants your email address? Give them (unique identifer).(some number).(your user name)@spamgourmet.com . The number is the number of emails they can send before the address is killed, and the user name is your user name at spamgourmet. Go sign up, and you never have to go back to the site again. It works.
I'm sure many people are like me, and read these testimonials and figure that they're hype. Trust me. They're not. I wish I had done it the first time I read about them.
I missed this story the first time it was posted. Taco: thanks for posting the dupe! It's useful information!
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Just this past Wednesday night I discovered that I left the PDF version of this report sitting on my iBook from the last time this article was posted. Before I deleted it, I actually read the entire thing. Here's pretty much all you need to know:
1. Don't give out your e-mail address any more freely than you have to.
2. For the love of God, NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page-- even in the comments or other places that it won't appear on the final, rendered web page. If you do, it WILL get picked up and you WILL get an assload of spam.
3. If you MUST provide your address on a web page or Usenet posting, slightly obfuscating it (i.e. "user at domain dot com") is, for now, 100% effective against fooling the spambots. Which frankly I find amazing, because that trick has been around for years.
~Philly
Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary
Ari Myers, cute girl from 80's sitcom "Kate & Allie"
Perhaps YOU should be the one to STF, sir!
organize and sue the rich FUCKS that send it !
GET RICH QUICK !
I operate a domain, so it is easy to substitute a unique email address when I register for some suspect activity.
To my shock, one of the single greatest sources of spam that I have gotten is from an email address placed on a CA voter registration form. I've never actually used that address or given it out for anything before or since, and yet a year later I am still getting 3 or so emails a day showing up in my spam filter from that address.
To my knowledge not one of these spams actually came from the CA governement, but I can only infer that either they sold it, or there is some big public list of voter registration emails that spammers know about.
You can see my post a few down from parent, but I'll repeat it here. Spam Gourmet provides you an easy way to have disposable addresses. Sign up with them and give them a user name, password, and your email address. Then, whenever you post an address, or subscribe to a web service, you give them this: (a unique identifier).(some number).(your spam gourmet user name)@spamgourmet.com . The number is the number of emails that can be sent to that address before it gets killed. (Mail after that point is "eaten", hence the name Spam Gourmet.) No need to actually "create" disposable addresses. No need to manage them. Go to Spam Gourmet once, and never go back.
I noticed some time ago I received a lot of spam from musiccity@, an e-mail address I provided for the once-popular peer-to-peer network morpheus.
The funny thing is, I just redirected this e-mail address mail towards sales@musiccity.com. It helped!
I kind of like my wife the way she is.
Their is like a zillion ways to thwart spam bots from harvesting e-mail. less cryptic ones like this one work good enough.
shows up as name@domain.com
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- NoSpam
user = "name";
site = "domain.com";
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + user + '@' + site + '\">');
document.write(user + '@' + site + '</a>');
// End -->
</SCRIPT>
With all that sodium and saturated fat, it's just not safe to eat it. And it's not cheap anymore, either, so it'll ruin your budget too! I guess it's okay baked in a brown sugar glaze with raisins, though. If you're desperate for meat.
Support your local troll.
Maintain a list of those with whom you want to collaborate via e-mail. Tell your prog to only download e-mails from these people, and inform you of SPAM with a message, asking you to check the server. When you feel like it, you can check the server (if you want).
h tm
Alternatively, use SpamAssasin, which uses Bayesian filtering. Btw, if you're going to be throwing the term Bayesian filtering around, please at least find out what Bayesian Inference and Bayes Factors are, and maybe understand MCMC.
A good place to start is here:
http://members.tripod.com/~Probability/bayes01.
Summarily, here's Bayes' Theorum:
P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A) / summation { P(B|A)P(A) }
Simply put, Bayes Theorum is a way of altering existing hypothesis' (the prior) progressively given newly generated data.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Since I've had an e-mail address I've had my penis extended 6 times, my breasts enlarged 8 times, I own the worlds supply of viagra and, and I get to have hot teen sex every night with 18 year old nymphos!
And to top it all off I've just received £3498435784354085 from Senator Hamza Kalu from Nigeria just for opening a bank account! ;)
...I just don't understand how some people are having so much trouble with it.
I've had the same email address since Sept 1992. We don't use any filtering on the mail server. I only get about 5 or 6 spam messages a day. On a bad day I might...might get up to 10. Granted, I have seen a marked increase in spam in the last year. True, it's probably going to get worse. I sometimes get more telemarketer calls a day than email spam tho...that says something.
I can only surmise that some people don't know how to browse the internet securely.
First rule of the internet, create a hotmail account for anything non-professional like general browsing and usenet. For professional sites, always uncheck the boxes that request news and updates. This is no-brainer stuff.
If you really want to eliminate spam, get rid of drop-box mail solutions like SMTP. Require the sender to request a token for email transfer.
Just my 2 cents.
Spammers, please take note of my email address above. Send me all the spam you've got. It helps improve Herbivore's accuracy.
What it actually said was:
"Despite the fact that the WHOIS database is publicly accessible, our project
received just a single spam message to an address that was in WHOIS for six
months."
So while there was only one, it is very different to there being none at all.
According to the report opting out of spam emails actually works by and large.
What I would like to know, is whether this means that the company (that now knows your email address is valid) just stops sending spam, or if they also do not onsell your private details to other spammers.
My hunch is that while they may stop sending spam, they could put you on a list and sell your email address to other marketers. I don't think the report looked into that.
My email address is in my usenet posts.
I make my email address easily available to spammers everywhere. Go ahead, add me to your list. You don't scare me!
I feed Herbivore all the spam I can but it doesn't like it much.
"For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org"
Hmmm... just after a section on disguising emails. Guess he'll need a new address soon:)
Bill
Upon seeing the box was too small, Schrodinger's Elephant breathed a sigh of relief.
I use a unique email address for each company I deal with on the net, and have been doing this for years. I've never received a spam to one of these addresses until recently. I got a spam to my cdw@ address which I use to deal with CDW. It was from a two-bit competitor of CDW's, so I seriously doubt CDW provided it. It was, interestingly, in the same state as CDW. My first guess is that a disgruntled employee left CDW along with its customer email list.
I contacted CDW requesting an explanation, and got no reply. Has anyone else had a CDW email address compromised recently?
(I got a spam to my WHOIS email address while typing this...)
DMCA regulates something that is strictly my own business, like do I watch my DVD under Windows or under Linux? If you send spam, you are making it a million people's business.
I tend to talk to people I know on the phone and just check my e-mail once per week to see if anyone sent a message about my programs. Even if you are right, I have to sit for 14 minutes doing nothing except deciding which messages with "Hi, Oleg" subject to open. And I deleted quite a few legitimate messages because I didn't recognize the address.
By the same token, if I went to sleep at 4am I won't want to have a chat with a telemarketer at 9. So I end up turning off my phone until I wake up and possibly missing calls from friends. And I don't want my physical mailbox to overflow just because I went on a one week trip during the holiday season. But spam is definitely the worst.
Communication between people is good. I should be able to publish my postal address, my phone number and by e-mail on the web and invite people to contact me if they looked at my stuff and want to chat. Remember when shareware came with a README file with all kind of contact information to send $15? I actually got a few nice snail mail letters with checks.
Spam has destroyed our ability for this kind of casual communication. People sending it or selling the products advertized make very little money compared to the value of our time or forced changes in our behaviour. It's time to stop them using technological, political or cultural methods, whatever works best.
They have to get past the content filters.. that is step 1.. mis-spell so that HUMANS know what is meant, but the filter cant figure it out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this is why i meta-mod all redundants with a +2. it usually allows me to read them. Anyway, Moderators should check the timestamp before modding down as redundant.
.. "Is this actually no funny, or do I just lack the sense of humor to realize just how funny this is" . i HATE overrated mods.
But what pisses me off is the over-rated mod. If you think that my opinion is invalid, then respond to it with your own insightful remarks (and don't be suprised when no one mods you up). If i have a +funny post, and you mod it redundant, then ask yourself this
Now, we get to off-topic. it's just as abused as the others, so I meta-mod them +2. Of course, I wouldn't have to do this if you moderators would just realize what the topic was, and bother to read the posts leading up to the one you are reading. Just because someones conversation leads off into something unrelated, doesn't mean that it is entirely off-topic. If the conversation leads to that post and follows a coherent flow of logic, it is NOT offtopic.
take this post for example. It seems off-topic to the unwitty moderator (who hasn't read this far anyway). However, I am have a valid disagreement with the way the above post was modified.
Now, to make a relavant comment. I use hotmail, I never get span (except from MSN, but it is THEIR damned webspace i'm using). Now, i am worried that i will get spam blasts from having my address on my website, but it hasnt happened yet. hopefully it never will. Perhaps i will jsut add REMOVETHISWICKYTICKYREMOVETHIS to the address name. a simple solution that many a person uses
YOU SUCK BALLS!
This has probably been posted before, butI think a fantastic little tool is the Active Spam Killer. I'm using 2.3 beta 3 which is very stable and worthwhile.
Basically it requires a once-off confirmation from any non-whitelisted and non-blacklisted user who sends you something. I haven't gotten one spam since I installed it. It's impossible to loose a real email and it's dead easy to install.
Thanks for the laugh! :)
While [posting to] "alt.sex.erotica" generated twice as much spam as the next newsgroup, we do not believe that this data supports any strong conclusion regarding which newsgroups are the most susceptible to spam.
Now, is that just wishful thinking on the authors' part :)
I use hotmail, I never get span (except from MSN, but it is THEIR damned webspace i'm using). Now, i am worried that i will get spam blasts from having my address on my website, but it hasnt happened yet. hopefully it never will.
It would be interesting if the authors of the study published the the names of the companies which refused to honor the opt-in/opt-out preferences or who sold e-mail addresses inappropriately. I'm not sure how "ethical" this is, but I'd really like to know....
moto411.com
Although its a pain in the arse, it seems worth it to me to quickly open Gimp/Photoshop and make a tiny graphic where your real email address is displayed.
Don't make it a hotlink to your address. Make whoever is sending it to you type it out. Its not as though any of those methods people are using now can be cut/pasted or hotlink'd to use your local mail client.
I'd be really suprised to find a email harvester that could process email addresses from JPG files.
-ted
Heh.. looks like they managed to get the server running quickly again :) check out the Netcraft OS History. Quick Apache update...
I doubt these folks' internet connections stay valid for very long once they start spewing email through their accounts, so that might have something to do with it....
-----------
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Just having an account can get you spam these days. Even at a university...especially at a university. Like any good system, my school's mail/student server is organized by year and/or alphabetized.
If any user changes up a directory...does an ls -1p > spamlist.txt and then mails said spamlist.txt to their friendly neighborhood spammer who pays them 20$...then all of those users just got added to somebody's hit parade, even if they never submitted their address to a public or private outlet.
I know this, because my email address is a bit ambiguous. One could email me at fake@university.edu or fake@xxx.university.edu and it would arrive in my mailbox. I have *NEVER* used this email address in any forum other than work-related issues and have *NEVER* used the "xxx" portion of the email when I have submitted it (in interest of brevity).
I currently procmail filter about a dozen different spammers (each sending different revisionary mails of each of their products) and invariably the address used is fake@xxx.university.edu (NOT the one I have ever used). Clearly someone determined what my account was named and then determined the mail server to be xxx.university.edu and put the two together. It's easy enough if you have an account on the server to simply list the home directories into a file and submit.
fake@xxx.university.edu is not listed on any google-indexed site or usenet article which furthers my belief that this came from within. Also, some spammers send the mails to about 15-20 university accounts at a time (they don't always hide the headers correctly and I get a cc list of about a dozen other users on my university's student server...ALL using xxx.university.edu).
These inside jobs are easy, do not negatively affect the committed party (unless the school is logging every ls command), and probably earn you enough money to buy a six-pack. A few beers for the inconvenience of your fellow students...great job, jerky.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I have suspected for some time that lots of spam gets sent to people who send (or recive) lots of forwards. This is the only explaination I can think of for some of the spam I've seen to some "private" (given only to friends) addresses. This implies, I suppose, that some friends, or friends of friends, or their friends are giving my address to spammers.
They also didn't test viruses as a method of address-harvesting. (Viruses like Klez that send mail to random people with forged From: addresses.) I have no clue how much spam comes from this, but it would be very interesting to know.
I note also that this study didn't include any control to compare results to "real" addresses that get used for lots of things, so maybe there is some other method that spammers use, that also wasn't tracked. Six months might be too short of a time. I know I get mail to new@walt (walt is a machine that had a usenet server on it during the mid-ninteties), so old email addresses, once harvested, get on CDROMS and keep getting hit forever.
Duplicates are obviously quite common here on slashdot. And the update on this story makes it obvious that only a minute or so of effort could stop them - but that seems to be a minute the editors don't have.
Perhaps we could put the ability to stop duplicates in the hands of the people making submissions? If they could cancel a story after it has been submitted and before it has been posted could the number of duplicates be reduced?
A bit off topic, but recently I started to receive some spam that consist of mostly only a gif or jpg. Off course, spamassassin did not catch it. Spam of images instead of ascii are quite efficient to bypass spam filters.
ISP could detect spam being posted because of the sheer bandwith used, but its not implemented yet.
Anybody has some insight of this new kind of spam?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
spampal is pretty cool too. It's also open sourced.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Shit you not.
My company has one employee - me.
Yet I've recieved a letter from the BSA saying that a disgruntled employee had reported my co for software piracy. Go figure. I know that the BSA was trolling the whois db cause it was sent to the address I used when I registered the domain.
I saw another discussion in a newsgroup where the BSA had sent letters to a guys home address but the names were 'Asdf Corp', 'Foobar Co', 'Compuglobalhypermeganet, Inc', and 'Global Domination Enterprises', etc.
-jpeg
I am so pleased to hear that most spammers get their target addresses from the web because I've been running my PAYBACK PAGE for some time now and it's nice to know it must be working.
Let those who live by the spam, die by the spam I say!
A note for neophytes: Never assume that the "from" address in a spam is valid or actually belongs to the spammer. Always go to the website being promoted and find some form of contact address there (often hidden in an HTML reference to a formmail script).
Then add em to your payback page and enjoy!
Check your server logs and if you're site's anything like mine, you'll find that the spammers' addresses are being harvested several times a day.
Whoopee!
PG&C Leasing and dmellc.net is a Florida based spam operation.
Do an arin.net lookup on any address in this range: 209.203.192.0 - 209.203.223.255
dmellc.net claims to be a reputable direct marketer (and they do have high-profile clients), yet they claim that they are compliant with S. 1618, an urban legend about a federal law regulating spam. That's a sure mark of a spam operation!
Fortunately, I managed to convince my ISP to blacklist them. 16 spams in 5 days, mostly pushing a penney stock in Florida
For the love of God, don't do that! All of a sudden you stop being part of the solution and become part of the problem.
Repeat after me, spammers lie. The return path to the sender is intentionally set wrong, and because they go through open HTTP proxies, you cannot believe that the IP addresses in the Recieved headers.
Bouncing back e-mail to a non-existant sender just generates needless traffic and load on your victim's server. Yes, you become the bad guy. But, hey, if it makes you feel good, then go ahead and do it.
you're able to delete it, blacklist it ...
See comment above about spammers lying. Blacklisting non-existant addresses does not make any sense. What are the chances that the spammer is ever going to fake their future mails with the same faked identity as in the past?
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Last year when I was looking for work, I used two very popular Australian job search engines. These were:
:-(
www.seek.com.au
www.mycareer.com.au
After I started applying for jobs online, I started getting about 5 spam messages per day. This is pretty dodgy. I had the mail delivered to my university account, which has now been deleted as I have finished. This email address was only given to colleagues, and to these two sites, so it was easy for me to determine the culprit.
Now I just get spam to my hotmail account
... you never want a three letter hotmail address like me...
200+ spams a day...
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
Woops, too late. Romanian gypsies occupy the high-end online fraud niche. Check ebay for D1x and see what I mean. For instance http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =2923100513&category=30020 (until ebay pulls it)
Boca Raton = Rat's Mouth
Quote:
"The amount of spammers resident in Boca Raton is incredible," says Steve Linford, a London-based catcher of the unwanted emails that deluge almost every inbox in the world. "There are really only 150 spammers doing 90% of all the spam we get in the US and Europe... at least 40 of them are in Boca Raton."
For the love of God, NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page
I still remember when guides for newbies told that not providing an usable return address was a breach of netiquette.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
You mean, like this?
As Prong once said, "I beg to differ".
/etc/aliases and running newaliases, so I often create new aliases for anything I sign up for. I recently posted to slashdot with an account like slashdot_2342s or similar, and within a couple of days got spam directed this email address. It would appear obvious that there ARE /.harvesting spammers out there.
Since I run my own mail server making a new aliaes is as simple as editing
-- I speak only for myself.
"Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one
idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's
sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all
of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated,
caustic twits."
-- Chuq Von Rospach, about Usenet
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