Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 11:24:40PM -0500, Thomas Beckett wrote:
> Steven Champeon wrote:
> > Does she happen to include any pointers to info on how we who are mail
> > administrators can block all mail of that kind from our servers? I get
> > enough spam as it is, without the file sizes suddenly ballooning.
> 
>       I don't know what's happening, but the amount of spam I'm getting has
> mushroomed in the last few weeks.  I delete upwards of 15 spams every
> morning, and they trickle in all day.  

Your address probably got scraped off the Web somewhere. We go through
cycles of this, especially given that my address has been the same for
the past five years and is plastered all over the Web and in Usenet -
I'll always get spam for schampeo AT hesketh.com and steve AT dhtml-guis.com,
I suspect. But every so often I'll see a spike in mail to random addys
- a recent example is mail sent to what appear to have been message IDs
from mail sent to mailing lists that have been publicly archived. Here's
a snippet from my virtusertable file:

# message IDs from an article Simon St. Laurent wrote:
# http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/08/09/rdfdb/
# scraped by spambots
200008022049.QAA05551 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
200008030436.AAA29373 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
200008030444.AAA29581 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
200008061638.MAA09311 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
200008081347.JAA04357 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
200008090020.UAA06745 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
# more message-IDs from w3.org archives
# http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Oct/0093.html
199910151706.NAA30347 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
# http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Oct/0090.html
199910151646.MAA29285 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
# http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2000JanMar/0089.html
200002022054.PAA30130 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
# http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2000JanMar/0091.html
200002031928.OAA01221 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter
# http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Feb/0038.html
200002081530.KAA13261 AT hesketh.net               spamfighter

Now, you may wonder what the point of sending mail to a message ID is,
but the spammers don't care. What's going to happen to the idiots who
wrote the ratware if 20% of the spew bounces or ticks off some mail
admin? Nothing.

>       I also wonder if it's possible that HTML spam isn't making matters
> worse, because every time one opens in my "preview" pane it hits a web
> server someplace and tells them they have a live email address.  

I know that some people seem to think that HTML email makes sense on
some level, but I'm constantly surprised by how many people continue to
use it even as they become aware of how it may be misused.

Gene Spafford said this better here:

 
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200110/msg00469.html

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