OT: USENET name vs. real name

[BillR]

From long experience I now never use a real email address on Usenet. This is one of the biggest sources of email addresses for the spammers. There are people who sell thousands of email addresses on CDs etc and I know for a fact they harvest Usenet addresses. For a bit of a laugh one day a colleague knocked up a unix script to see how many addresses he could get. It was too easy, the script took 10 minutes to write and after a hour or so he had over 100k addresses... Oh, and it was a trivial matter in the script to take out common spambusters like "yourpants" and "NOSPAM" ...

Also if you use a work address the company's spam filter may block much of the spam created but the employer may well take exception.

[BillP]

I've always found that the username speaks volumes :-)

[Witchy]

Yeah, a proper PITA but Outlook rules seem to filter 90% of it. Trouble is they also filter 1% of legitimate mails so I still have to trawl looking for subject lines......arses....

cheers

witchy/binarydinosaurs

[Martin Angove]

Just been through that - though I seem to have been luckier than you in that the mails peaked at about 5,000 a day. I set up a program to scan the "to:" field of the messages on Demon's server and delete appropriate ones without bothering to download anything except the header. Two weeks on, and I'm down to 10 or 20 messages a day which is well "in the noise" as far as spam is concerned.

I (tried to) contact Demon and have so far received absolutely no response.

My personal theory is that this person has / these people have decided that some spam is rejected by intelligent MXes or servers which reject email without a valid domain name in the "from:" or perhaps the "return-path:" headers. They therefore look for valid domains and use "anything@" for a while before moving on.

I'm no techie though, so I could easily be wrong.

Hwyl!

M.

[John Rumm]

I had that for a while - it seems that one of the recent internet worms picks up a "from" address at random from its victims computer.

Since your email address could be sitting on a computer of someone who has in the past communicated with you, it is possible that if that computer gets infected you end up getting the fallout!

[Dave Plowman]

I post to several groups including a couple of US ones using my real name and real address.

I reckon I'm sent about 30-50 spams per day, excepting the SWEN worm. About half a dozen get downloaded - the rest are deleted at my server by AntiSpam, and the odd ever changing SWEN that isn't by my limit of 100k which asks me what I want to do with these before downloading.

From what I gather, plenty with munged addresses have been hit hard by the SWEN worm. And some ISPs have been temporarily closed by it too.

To me, life's too short to worry too much about spam when it's so easy to keep down to acceptable limits.

[Gnube]

Interesting you say that, I have found the odd group here and there where it was just plain abrasive for some reason I often wonder about, but never figure out. Now is that just me having a bad group? I'm sure this can happen as most of the time I get on just fine, but there have been one or two! Sure dropped them quickly mind you! ;O) Maybe I just didn't lurk quite long enough - hard to say for sure.

Take Care, Gnube {too thick for linux}

[BillP]

Last night I changed my account details so that the user name was

'Hung-Like-A-Donkey' and tried to post the message 'I always found that the username speaks volumes. :-)

The bloody thing failed to post. I changed my settings back this morning and the message was still in the out box.

Oh well you can't win them all.

[Colin Wilson]

As it says in my sig, I never used to use a munged email address, but I was getting in the region of 2 SWEN per *minute* at one point to the "old" email address.

Sadly, my primary email address (different ISP) has now started to get spammed after 9 spam-free months (don`t know how it got "out") and a domain I have email forwarding from has had the odd dictionary attack, but at least with the forwarding option I can give traceable email addresses out...

[Owain]

"Colin Wilson" wrote | As it says in my sig, I never used to use a munged email address, but I | was getting in the region of 2 SWEN per *minute* at one point to the | "old" email address.

I changed my usenet email address and it got SWENned within two hours after just two postings.

Owain

[jerrybuilt]

I think, as others have said, that it depends on the general demeanour of the poster, as well as the quality of the question/answer. Also, if one psots "anonymously" that can lead to problems, for some reason some people don't like it. If the anonymous poster is behaving badly, I can see why - if not, then I cannot see a problem!

be [e-mail]! Shop all amazing products and get our special offers!

[Clive Summerfield]

Yo Lobie! Welcome to the group.

Cheers Clive

[usenet]

No it isn't, take a look at:-

from Usenet is a very distant second to harvesting from web pages. My addresses I use here rarely receive any spam.

[IMM]

My address is real and gets tons of spam.

[John Rumm]

I suppose it only takes a handful of "less that helpfull people" (i.e. plonkers!) to haunt a group for a while, and people will tire of posting there a look for another group. One bad apple and all that....

I have also noticed there are a small number of people who obviously monitor a large selction of groups for postings on a particular pet topic of theirs. As soon as the trigger phrase comes up, they dive into a thread - cause a lot of heat and noise - and then vanish again just as quickly. Maybe some people just like a good argument - and on usenet you don't need to pay the fiver ;-)

[Dave Plowman]

Yes. Don't for heaven's sake mention magnets...;-)

[Thomas Prufer]

Known as "grepping loons" in another group I frequent, from the unix "grep" command, used to search files for a given phrase. Some known triggers are spelled with asterisks because of that -- m*gnet*c w*t*r tr**tm*nt for instance.

I like the phrase "grepping loon"...

Thomas Prufer

(My real name is Captain Kirk).

[Huge]

My "username" *is* my "real" name. Yes, it's not the one I was christened with, but it's the one everyone I know uses nonetheless.

[John Rumm]

LOL... I spose we could include L*g*t b*lbs and po**r cycl*ng in with those! ;-)

[Gnube]

Blow me, I hadn't spotted that; interesting!

Take Care, Gnube {too thick for linux}