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

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 10:11:36PM -0500, Alexander Wilson wrote:
> 2. Most spammed addresses come from harvested addresses and "best 
> guess" addresses. (If I own MYDOMAIN.COM, I'll get emails addressed to 
> WEBMASTER AT MYDOMAIN.COM as well as POSTMASTER AT MYDOMAIN.COM and a few 
> others even though though those email addresses don't technically 
> exist).

postmaster@ should exist if you get mail at that domain, and it should
be monitored, along with abuse@. It's an RFC compliance issue, and many
folks refuse to accept mail from any server that doesn't support those
addresses. So you may want to reconsider. (webmaster@ and the others, eh,
use your best judgement - but mail admins need a way to contact role
accounts if only to report abuse.)

> I get a couple hundred spams a day because my addresses are posted on
> websites (mostly my own, but also versiontracker and a couple others).

Yup. Me, too.

> A few companies harvested my addresses and spammed me and then 
> sold my addresses to other spammers and now I have to use Apple's junk 
> mail feature or email would be totally impractical.

They may also have simply created them and other permutations, either
through malice or incompetence - I've got several hundred examples of
munged versions of addresses we host; a common variant tends to be 
chopping the address up (hence, 'rdomo@' from 'majordomo@', etc.) or
appending random nonsense to the end of the localpart. We got joe jobbed
last year; Brian Westby was sending out spam with a forged address in our
domain. It was only a few days before we started getting spammed /at/
that completely bogus address. And now we get spammed at forged addresses
created by viruses like SoBig and MyDoom and Netsky. Whee. I'm amazed
you don't get dozens of these a day - 'alex' is one of the localparts
used by MyDoom. I'm just glad I didn't use 'steve' as my address; that's
another MyDoom localpart.

> If you don't post your email address online, and you don't own your
> domain (as you wouldn't with mac.com), then you're going to have a
> good chance of avoiding most of the spam.

...unless you have a "common" address in a domain targeted by spammers,
like oh, mac.com. Or if your localpart is found in a sufficient number
of other addresses; I've seen spammers mix and match the localparts
from lists of addresses with other domains. Additionally, if your email
address is Cc:'d on a spam someone else gets, you're at risk for random
infection by viruses as well, or it can be spidered from dejagoogle
or n.a.n-a.s or many other sources. You simply can't protect your email
address anymore; there are too many ways it can get exposed through
channels you don't have any control over. I wish this weren't the case,
but it is. 

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