OT: USENET name vs. real name

You've been very lucky, then. I had to abandon a couple of addresses due to junk, most of which was directly attributable to Usenet postings. The address I'm using here is _almost_ real - the spelling of my surname has been slightly altered.

Sheila Viemeister

It's odd isn't it, I don't believe I've been lucky, I think it must be related to the newsgroups one posts in. However I certainly do get a huge amount of junk mail directed to some addresses of mine which are on web pages so my experience bears out the survey. If anyone is interested it's at:-

I guess it could use filtering mechanisms like removing an uppercase word from an otherwise lowercase address, but you've got no guarantee that it would produce a useable address. Plus people usually come up with other ways of spamproofing it, like adding YOURPANTS, THECRAP or THECAT to the message, then you can get some, er, 'comedy' in as well :o) I used to use MAINS in a munged email so I could say 'remove MAINS before proceeding' but got bored with it and reversed my domain name instead.

What WOULD be useful is a definite 'yes' or 'no' as to whether email address harvesting software really does ignore addresses like 'usenet@' or 'abuse@' or 'news@'.

cheers

witchy/binarydinosaurs

We have an open link on the site to:

I put an email form on my web pages for initial contact. I dom't actually put the email address. Seems to work.

I would agree with the bit about mid nineties postings, one address I still use gets about 100 spams a day and has only ever been used for usenet (not any more though).

The other new source is these electronic greeting cards, some moron sent one to my work email address which I had been using for over 4 years with not one spam. Within a week it started and I am now getting over 80 a day on that address.

Definite NO, I get spam on this account.

KillTheJunk.com now handles my email before it gets to me so I don't worry about it, but I do get junk on this account (news@ used for Usenet only).

Cheers,

Andy

... and loses some business because I avoid forms like the plague. I am much more likely to E-Mail you if I can use my E-Mail client that I'm used to and the editor I'm used to for composing the message.

Apparently if you simply put the E-Mail address in the HTML using the %xx format for characters the E-Mail harvesters won't find the address.

Yes, both I and my son get lots of junk mail sent to addresses on our isbd.demon.co.uk domain which neither of has used for sending mail for years and years. I now simply dump all mail sent to that address as I know no one that I know (or want mail from) uses it.

Is it just that junk mailers use very old lists or what?

According to the CDT survey even addresses which get lots of junk (due to being on a publicly visible web site) get rapidly reducing amounts of junk if you remove the address from the web site. So why do we still get it to our demon addresses?

Crap, I meant definite YES.

Soz...

Andy

You should see what happened to my old demon account a couple of years back. A spammer decided to use my domain as their return address. Something like

Christian.

Even more OT but I suspect that most of us are technically cannibals :-)

Ever chewed a fingernail and swallowed?

Could even be a vampire - how many people have cut a finger and sucked the wound to clean it?

{Which leads me to ask the difference between a cannibal and a vampire - is it how much of a person you eat?]

Hmmm...must do something productive for a change.....

Dave R

I got nothing at this address until somebody hacked our server and recoverd adresses. I have a filter set to remove mails the server flags as dodgy wrt viruses. Not because I'm worried, I use a Mac, but so I don't have to manually delete them. However the first thing I do on opening my email in the morning is to delete the spam that isn't virused. Fortunately my employment here is about to end so after a while the spam will simply bounce.

Peter

I have my email address (as a mailto link) on a well visited site, with many inbound links and a good google rank - and I get maybe 1 spam a month on that address.

This address I get lots of spam for. Lots and lots and lots. But I'm hard. I can take it.

I have an email address which was part of the BT Internet trial (around '95, I think). At the time the developers were so naive that they published all the addresses in an American white pages to make us easier to contact. Mind you, SPAM wasn't such a problem then.

My original address has long been a target for SPAM, and I have left the mail uncollected for a while. The mailbox recently had over 9,000 unread messages. This breached the limits set by BTO and all new mail was rejected. I left it for a month or so to see if the constant rejections resulted in the SPAM traffic dropping off. I recently cleared it out but the SPAM is still flowing, so rejected mail doesn't seem to get you removed from SPAM lists.

I have another account where I filter out the SPAM and never reply, but the SPAM seems to be on the increase.

My vote is for a closed mail community where you don't accept any email unless it is from a registered and authenticated user, and all participating MTAs have mutual authentication and a mutual agreement to ditch any SPAM producers. This would shut out a lot of the developing world, but standard email would still be there if you wanted it. However you could be reasonably happy about revealing your email address because any abuse would result in the abuser being barred. This would obviously cost ( a big downside) because you would have to take steps to confirm the indentity of the subscribers. However the cost could be balanced against the current costs of SPAM processing. Doubt anyone would pay, though, as the perception of the Internet is that it should all be free.

Hi, ho - OT rules today :-)

Dave R

I know a bloke who lost two fingers in a guillotine and didn't notice until he was saying good night to the boss.

Now there's a thing. Maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago I started getting loads and loads of 'mail failure' type messages from countries I didn't know existed, and looking at the headers I found the reply-to of the original message was one of my email addresses!

So, straight onto Demon tech support who insisted I had one of the current worms on my machine despite the fact I'm behind a firewall and such stuff is blocked before it even gets onto the house network.....

I also get the mails whether my mail machine is connected to the network or not, so SOMEONE is using my address, and the only way I can make it stop is either by changing hostname, which costs, or jump ship to another ISP, which costs......

cheers

witchy/binarydinosaurs

Interesting bit on the subject here:-

The web scanning versions also tend to work with email addresses that can be found in the plain text of the HTML source. So if you encode the address (and the mailto: part of links) with character codes rather than string literals you will fool most of them.

I expect that the reason for this is that to remove the obfuscation from a web page would require rendering some/all of the web page - far more time consuming, and also would leave the spammer open to attack from malicious web sites (which would be a shame - NOT) ;-)

They didn't used to be quite so thick as most "tech" support, but I'm going back 6 years or so.

I get about 1/2 MB per hour of bounces of this kind on my _yahoo_mail_ account - can't possibly be a worm at my end sending the virus emails. The recent virus mails spoof the from field.

What I can't understand is that the bounce message appears as 142kB, but there's nothing to it (maybe 2k).