Re: ROUNSFELL UKGID

On Sat, 20 May 2006 12:38:56 GMT, SBD wrote:

Have you never heard of "mail strippers"?
These are pieces of software that can be used to list every email
address of the messages posted on any newsgroup.
These addresses are then sold to the companies who send out SPAM.
A while back I used to do what you do, post my ordinary email address on
newsgroup posts.
One day I received over 2000 junk mails to that address and that went on
every day for months! As my email address is the address of the FHS I
run, I found I was losing important messages, my server mail box filled
up and rejected mails.
The news group I had posted to was a Genealogy group!

Spambots harvest email addresses from every single newsgroup there is,
not just a genealogy group, and they do it on a regular basis.

You're scaremongering. I'd say that 98% of those in this group are
intelligent enough to know how to deal with spam.

In one group I'm subbed to, I use a valid email address and, to be
perfectly honest, it hasn't had any more than half a dozen spam mails
in all the time I've used it.

If you've received 2000 junk mails to an normal address then you would
have to have used it on a site that was harvesting or you've got an
ISP that sells email addresses to spammers. My NTL account (which was
*never* used at all) only ever got spam mail in it because (a) NTL
were known to sell their customers email addresses and (b) spammers
use software that will randomly generate addresses for spam attacks to
see which ones bounce and which don't. If it doesn't bounce then
there's a good chance that it's "live" and therefore a good "target".
The other thing that will help generate more spam for an address is
actually opening the garbage. Open it and if it's designed to sent a
read receipt to the originator, it will do so and thus confirm a
"live" address which can be sold on. LineOne used to do the same
thing. I don't know if they still do because I dumped them when they
got taken over by Tiscali who decided to change all the NNTP forums
into web based bulletin boards.

There are a number of very simple ways of avoiding spam - and using a
web based forum isn't one of them! Munging an address by replacing
..com or .net (or whatever) with .invalid is the best way because you
never know if an address you've "invented" actually exists.
Alternatively you can use a spam trap address with a genuine one in
the "reply to" field. Another way is to put the email address in your
post with the @ replaced by the word "at" and the . replaced with
"dot".

Spam bots will strip out anything in capitals now, so having a genuine
address but with part of it in capitals, which are then stripped out,
will render a valid address invalid.

Apart from anything else, it makes sense to use specific mailboxes for
specific mail, esp if you use the same email address for different
things. Also download to your email client but set it not to retain
any mails on the server. Problem solved. Easy isn't it?? :))
--
Genealogy: is it a thing of the past??
http://www.spiritisup.com/colors1.swf
.

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