Guesspam on Gmail
I created a Gmail account for my mom a few months ago. We gave the address to one other person, and then forgot about it. I found it again today and logged in.
She had 6 messages from her friend, and 46 spam messages (anything from before August 2 had been auto-deleted).
This for an address that’s never been in circulation.
Why? Her username is in the Norwegian dictionary…
September 3rd, 2006 at 11:06 am
I’m sure that her friend has infected computer, so your mother’s address was sniffed or picked up by virus owner or so.
I’d sugget to check address book - if it contains this email, my guess-work possibly right.
September 3rd, 2006 at 6:34 pm
A virus infection on her friend’s computer is a posibility. I do get some spam that can be explained no other way. But if you have a common name or dictionary word like joe@example.com or info@example.com you will get spam even if no one knows your address.
September 4th, 2006 at 4:41 am
To Makc,
It’s possible. Trouble is, we haven’t positively shown this to happen. Sure, if the e-mails had been sent from that computer. But I haven’t seen any tests showing that e-mail addresses in an infected machine’s address book end up in spam lists. Maybe it does happen. I have certainly speculated that it’s going to happen if it hasn’t already.
That particular machine was wrecked a while ago. After they rebuilt it, they’ve been fairly careful with it. But who knows. I haven’t checked it for infections.
September 4th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
In my case, the reason I think the spam I was getting came from a virus infection is the from address was a person I used to work with on a website. His address was no longer listed with mine on the site and his address had been dead for a long time. The only explanation is that both our addresses were in someone’s address book with an infection. But I think those emails were the virus, not spam.
January 21st, 2007 at 1:40 pm
It’s more than likely just a dictionary spammer. They use a known email domain and just send emails to a list of words @thatdomain.com. I get spam to my isp email address and I don’t ever give that out.