Re: Minor fraud

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 08:52:57 GMT, Palindrome <me9@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

They did send some sort of "You are a norty spammer" replies many years
ago and did have web pages about the use of privacy addresses - but that
all seems to have stopped. I can't find anything authoritative saying to
discontinue using privacy addresses as an anti-spam measure.

Good thing too. A great deal of the "spam" I get these days are
bounce messages from mailservers telling me that the "my" mail cannot
be delivered, or has been blocked etc. Of course, the original
spammer was using my email address in the "reply" field of their spam,
causing the mailserver to double the amount of spam.

It is unfortunate that the practice of spammers of using real email
addresses in the "reply" field has made it undesirable for mailservers
to issue "bounce" replies. Which is a pity because they are very
useful in the event of a mistake in the email address or a genuine
email, or when a person has changed their email address etc.

I don't really know how the system works so couldn't say whether there
is an advantage to using .invalid to privacy.net. It may reduce (very
marginally) network loading to do the former.

ISTM that the best way would be to use a misconfigured address or (if
the newsreader will not allow that), a non-existent domain so that
anyone trying to use it would get instant feedback that the address is
no good.

--
Cynic


.

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