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spam Count by Leak Path of Address


waugh

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These are just remarks in passing; I'm not asking for solutions.

Today I received a spam to an address of mine that I have published continuously all over the web for the last at least 13 to maybe 15 years, and it reminded me how infrequently that happens. By far most of the spams I receive (maybe 20 or 25 a day) come on addresses that I gave to corporations when signing up for their services. An intermediate number (a few a month) come to an address that I used (stupidly) as my name on Wikipedia. All the latter are in Chinese.

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I once deliberately poisoned one of my web pages with several thousand bogus email addresses. Big mistake: every now and again I see evidence that the list was harvested. It's a nuisance because my server and its connection aren't particularly well endowed with horsepower. Thankfully setting up the means to detect and block spam runs using this list wasn't too difficult, and the server which tries to deliver the spam has its mail queue clogged for quite some time.

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I had one out on the internet for ages - it picked up heaps of spam after a few years. It was also used to correspond with maybe 120-150 corporate clients in several countries. I always thought being published on web pages was the reason. Corresponded with fairly well the same clients from other addresses without seeing the same spam numbers resulting. Eventually dropped it some years back, it was still ramping up the spam despite not being used for some four years prior to that. An IBM/ATT/attglobal address.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Today I received a spam to an address of mine that I have published continuously all over the web for the last at least 13 to maybe 15 years, and it reminded me how infrequently that happens. By far most of the spams I receive (maybe 20 or 25 a day) come on addresses that I gave to corporations when signing up for their services. An intermediate number (a few a month) come to an address that I used (stupidly) as my name on Wikipedia. All the latter are in Chinese.

Just goes to show that everyone has different experiences.

I can tell you that I have never received a piece of spam to a specific address I have given a company. The only emails I have received to those addresses is emails related to the specific company.

The reason I searched and found spamcop was an address I primarily used in newsgroups well before that was not a good idea any longer (when people would not reply to the group if your email was faked).

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Just goes to show that everyone has different experiences.

I can tell you that I have never received a piece of spam to a specific address I have given a company. The only emails I have received to those addresses is emails related to the specific company.

The reason I searched and found spamcop was an address I primarily used in newsgroups well before that was not a good idea any longer (when people would not reply to the group if your email was faked).

Lately a lot of the spam I have been receiving has been directed to an email address I used to create a mailing list on Yahoo Groups. One or two that weren't blocked by my server and that I've taken the time to look at (duly reported)have been sent to a yahoo email address, with a Reply-to for a bogus address at my server.

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There was a time when scientific publications containing e-mail contact adresses were in thw public domain. Times have changed, the security and requirements to get access to those publications have been restrected and require registration. Nevertheless, some of us for prctical reasons have been stuck using compromized e-mail addresses and with them the load of spam and other nepharious attempts that come with it. Bottom line is that there will always be a need for filtering services like Spamcop as long as criminal activity is allowed on www....

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Just goes to show that everyone has different experiences.

I, too, am struck by how much our reports differ.

Some of the entities such that my address with them has somehow leaked are:

- Ameritrade

- Zecco Trading

- Smartgroups (defunct web service)

- ContrarianPicks (not surprising; an obvious scam in the first place)

- Return Path (not surprising)

- StuffIt (software for Microsoft O/S)

- this forum

None of the addresses produces any hits in Google search.

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...Some of the entities such that my address with them has somehow leaked are:

...

- this forum

None of the addresses produces any hits in Google search.

That's disturbing. Some people have reported definite upswings against addresses spammed-against and included (generally in munged form) in reports (others have apparently contrary experience), but I also recall a few others who have mentioned spam to forum registration addresses. I think yours though might the first time a possibly unique(?) forum registration address has been implicated (or those other assertions are maybe unclear on whether or not those were unique addresses - I don't recall now).
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