Spamhuntress

I just wanted to remind you all (for the nth time) that the time you could use catch all e-mail is past.

I had a domain I hadn’t done anything with. I had a one pager with an under construction sign or similar. No e-mail going in or out. And I’d forgotten to disable catch all. I found an inbox full of e-mail to the standard addresses - sales, webmaster etc. I was lucky spammers hadn’t started using it as a faked reply address yet!

Limit the number of addresses you use. The more addresses, the more chances you’ll get spam. You can of course retire an address once it gets intolerable amounts of spam. Just remember you shouldn’t do that unless you have a server that REJECTS e-mail (I’m talking big picture here, consumers will of course do whatever they like. But cancelling an e-mail address with a server that bounces e-mail to non-existent addresses adds to the spam problem). If you have a domain on an e-mail server that bounces mail to non-existent addresses, at the very least ask your postmaster why.

I was reading Richi’s tongue in cheek list of challenges to people who think they’ve got a solution to spam, and remembered all the people who wrote to me trying to get me to tout their solutions - usually along the lines of using catch all, using encoded addresses whenever you sign up for something new, then retire addresses that start to get spam.

Guys, using unique addresses for each place you sign up for comment is an excellent idea, if you WANT to receive lots of spam, and your shtick is to find out exactly what sites are used to feed spammer lists….

And please send out mail to all your friends (with all those addresses in the BCC fields), warning them NOT to forward the latest hoax to all their friends. All those addresses in those much forwarded messages eventually end up on spam lists, with no interaction from those who receive them. I got one of those Bill Gates is sharing his wealth e-mails THIS WEEK! Just forward this e-mail and he’ll pay out. Yeah, right… I can’t get past how gullible people are…

EDIT: An ex-spammer said they didn’t collect e-mail addresses that got into forwards. But he forgot one thing: Viruses that go through all received mail and extract addresses. I don’t know if these viruses go through the body of the mail, but if they do, they will get all those e-mail addresses in forwarded hoaxes.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 7:40 am and is filed under Mail spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.