Slashdot Mirror
Where Is Spam When You Want It?
Sean writes "In a complete twist to what everybody else is trying to do these days, I need to attract spam to an e-mail address for a research survey I am conducting. I have submitted a few articles to a handful of Usenet groups, and I have signed up to some general mailing lists but so far I have nothing to show for it. How come by personal account gets 100+ spam each day yet when I try to find it I get nothing? Where should I post my address so that it attracts spam?"
I ran an experiment to do just this... Originally USENET (a decade ago I did that one), web pages, etc... Hundreds of trap address' across many of the domains in my control -- harvest and block 'em early has been my general method... :)
I recently took 1 Windows 2K box (SP2) and put it directly online in the DMZ type zone. Do NOT patch it and add no virus software. Load some trap address' (never used before) into the Outlook address book.
It took twelve (12) minutes from plugging it in to getting many, many infections, to the final spam. Typical time is 3-4 hours usually and I've seen the test go for as long as 8 hours.
How many people do you know that use Outlook and may have your email in their address book? The bitch of the matter? No Windows here anywhere, well, except for VirtualPC which makes such tests so damn easy -- too bad Microsoft had to buy them up too...
Sign up for an account there, forward the spam to your new mailbox and start following links to advertisements and such. If they ask for your email address, give it to them. Won't take long.
I get spam from my domain registry, which has an email associated with it. I get the Nigerian stuff this way.
You want spam? You should have put in your email address into the submitted article...
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
We all know that the Spam won't show up if you want it. That's against the very nature of spam.
All annoying things always happen every time except for the one time you try and prove the phenomenon to a non-beliver. Well known fact.
Good luck at finding the spam (wow, I never thought I'd have say that.)
Make an ebay account with your email address in it and just start bidding. This is an excellent way to ruin an otherwise perfectly good email address. I was doing all right on the spam front until I did this. Big whoops. *hits head on desk* Yeah, stupid me.
You'll quickly become inundated with "How-tos" to Ebay, "official" emails from Ubid by people attempting to fraudulently gain access to your personal information, more tips-and-tricks, more offers from uBid, and of course a plethora of marvelous online drugstore advertisements.
Enjoy.
also try porn sites, gambling sites, and more importantly, paste it on slashdot. My spam trap address here gets hit ALL the time, usually several times a day, which has helped me greatly in tuning my firewall.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
If you deliberately bait spam, your research will only be about spam as it effects bait e-mail accounts. Your conclusions won't be applicable to normal e-mail use habits.
Want to survey spam as it effects a normal, real-life, daily-use e-mail address? Get a new address and starting using it as your primary account. Anything less will be irrelevant statistics.
Give it to some of your friends and relatives, soon you'll recieve 20 or so joke chain letters every day...
In your own inbox, get a couple of hundreds of spam.
.....
Take the urls (DO NOT CLICK ON THEM) and strip them of the stuff after the '?'
Go to each of those 'unsibscribe' pages and put the test account in the email to be removed box.
Its the best way to get spam. The spammers will generally use it as confirmation that your address does indeed exist, and theyll happily put you in their alive list, where you are shure to get everything they are selling.
I was in the exact same situation, actually, and found spamarchive.org to be very helpful. Any one of the files on their ftp site should have enough spam to keep you busy for a while.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Write a HOWTO and put your real e-mail address in there.
;)
Worked for me
- Post a comment on Slashdot with the e-mail address visible
- If on a popular e-mail provider such as AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo, put up a profile and go to a chat room.
- Allow your e-mail address to be listed on any of the directories.
- Put your e-mail on a Geocities website.
New research shows spam no longer a problem!
Put it on a web page which gets any moderate amount of traffic. I did that with some spam-bait addresses, and it's amazing how much they generate. In a few months, they've identified over 22,000 unique servers sending spam.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
"Research Survey" = getting back at evil ex-girlfriend.
Buy a throw-away domain name and post an index page with a email address. you could also use the method where you record the IP address of the spider by generating the email address on the fly. with [IP of spider]@domain.com and then set up a catch all email box. then you are monitoring the spiders ips and the mail servers ips. this idea was posted on /. a few months back but I couldnt find the link.
pretzel_logic
"My deadbeat roommate has pissed me off once too often. On a completely unrelated note, I'm looking for ways to attract lots of spam to an email address for... er... research. Yes, research sounds plausible."
spamthistohelpusout@someresearchcompany.com
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If you deliberately bait spam, your research will only be about spam as it effects bait e-mail accounts. Your conclusions won't be applicable to normal e-mail use habits.
The relevance of a baited addres depends on how one does the baiting. I'd say that a handful of usenet posts, pasting it to a couple of web pages, use of it to create accounts on websites (e.g. here), etc would be very representative of common patterns of address disclosure.
Create Several Email Addresses - Be scientific ...
.....
Address 1 - (Control Address) Post No Where and read no messages until the testing time is over
Address 2 - Post On Usenet (Deja.com)
Address 3 - Post In Public ICQ program
Address 4 - Porn Sites
Address 5 - IRC
etc
I think you have to wait, as from what I understand most of the people who spam actually buy spam lists from other people. The spam lists seem to be compiled like phone books, so they send out batches of addresses like every month or so. I'm sure your mailbox will be stuffed to the breaking point about two months from now.
Is the account you want spammed provided by the same ISP as your personal account? It sounds like the ISP you are using for the research account might be doing a really good job killing off the spam before it ever gets to you. In order for the research to be uncorrupted you need to verify that your ISP passes all e-mails through to you, rather than spam filtering.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
That isn't any sort of encrypted text. It is simply a (pathetic) attempt of evading filters...
You insensitive clod!
You've ruined the poor boy's dream!
Just think of the hours of fun he could have had "cracking" the "code".
Just think of the elaborate code -- and equally elaborate conspiracy behind it -- he might have created in a desperate obsession to make his data fit his theory!
It could have been a new formularization to rival the Illuminati, Ancient Astronauts, secret codes in the Bible, or some other tortuous, contrived theory! Why, he might even have constructed the ultimate conspirarcy theory, a religion!
But no! You had to cruelly disillusion him. And rob us of the fruit(iness) of his labors.
For shame!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
So you want a lot of spam, do ya?
p e= www
http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=inprogress&ty
That's Spamcop's list of spam-vertised web sites. All of those sites have submission forms; just put the email address in there and you'll be rockin' and rollin' within a few hours. I got into a 'spam war' with one of my roommates back in college, and with that Spamcop list I was able to render his email account COMPLETELY useless within a couple of hours (If you're reading this, sorry 'bout that Brian... )
Speaking of spam, on a random side note, I've recently started checking all of my email accounts with Shadango.com. Anybody else tried that yet? Shadango allows you to have advanced filtering applied to ALL of your existing accounts (both POP and IMAP). It's frickin' great. So now I don't get any more spam, plus I can check all 5 of my email accounts from one place. They've also got file storage, a calendar, etc. It's money. Check it out.
-Nate