spammers

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Luettgen [mailto:crash3m at yahoo.com]

> The amount of spam you get is directly proportional to
> the number of sites you submit it to.  

Not really true any more.  Once ONE spammer gets your address, they start
reselling it.  They get addresses from lots of things these days, including
the archived copy of this mailing list.  There are engines out there that do
nothing but scan every page of the internet for strings of
<something>@<something>.<***>.  There are also methods to scan mailservers
directly for valid addresses, and I swear somebody's running a program that
must check possible alpha strings at random.

I have an address at work that I've given to ONE outside vendor - Iomega, in
fact - and I get about 15-20 spam messages a day on that address.

There are some good stories out there - one guy's saga of a non-valid
address on his system that got started when somebody mis-typed their address
on a web page registration, and is now up to about 300 messages per day.