Re: spam traps

From: Roy Schestowitz (newsgroups_at_schestowitz.com)
Date: 03/18/05 

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 09:55:51 +0000

BearItAll wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 06:02:52 +0000, Anonymous wrote:
>
>> Thank you for introducing nomail.afraid.org to us. I'll remember
>> it...maybe I can try using it in my Outlook Express newsgroup account.
>> Maybe pLeAsEsEnDmEsPaM@nomail.afraid.org. That would be interesting.
>>
>> "David W. Hodgins" <dhodgin1661@nomail.afraid.org> wrote in message
>> news:op.sntib7ekqz8bjc@localhost...
>>> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:15:44 -0500, Anonymous <anon@anon.blah> wrote:
>>>
>>> >> discussed as I was trying, with some other users, to find an address
>> that
>>> >> was at a domain that really didn't exist, yet still looked sort of
>>> >> appetizing so I could tease spammers who would otherwise be turned
>>> >> off
>> by
>>>
>>> See my sig.
>>>
>>> I registered nomail.afraid.org for use in usenet, back when swen first
>> appeared.
>>> It resolves to 127.0.0.10, so spammers and viruses will be trying to
>>> send
>> to
>>> the machine they're sending from.
>>>
>>> Regards, Dave Hodgins
>>>
>>> --
>>> Change nomail.afraid.org to rogers.com to reply by email.
>>> (nomail.afraid.org has been set up specfically for
>>> use in usenet. Feel free to use it yourself.)
>
> But you said you want to view the spam in case any legitimate emails are
> there.

It was not him who said that, it was the OP. I think Dave intended to punish
the spammers as well as benign mail senders, which may be just a mere 0.1%.

> If you have your own domain, or your ISP allows you several email
> addresses then,
>
> For sites that you definitely don't want or
> expect emails from you can use a blatant spam@yourdomain and have it
> deleted on arrival at your ISP side.

That's exactly what I do. I divide/sort/filter E-mail by addresses.
Depending on the account, you know how hastily you can purge
uninvited/unrecognised mail.

> Then for those where you expect some genuine emails, use another name,
> example maybespam@yourdomain. When you receive that still pass it
> through spamassassin to get rid of the more obvious spam. Then hopefully
> those you actually need to manually can are very few.
>
> I used to be picky about this stuff at work and home, looking manually
> down the list of those that get filtered into the local spam box, but I
> wont do that now. Even with the ISP's spam filter (which in my case is
> fairly weak), my local spamassin on my mail server catches several hundred
> per day. So now anything marked as spam goes straight to /dev/null.

ISP filters are weak because they would get plenty or work (i.e. messages
from customers) if they killed messages that were anticipated by the
receiver.

> I trust spamassassin, at the times I have manually scanned the emails in
> recent years I haven't found any that were legitimate in the spam box.
> Some of my own regular expressions on the other hand tended to be a little
> more, erm, over zealous. Filtering out the whole of Koria when working for
> an international company wasn't a terribly good idea.
>
> It is a shame though because it used to be the case in news groups where
> occasionally you would continue to help or just talk to someone in private
> emails, I even telnet'ed (pre ssh) into a place in Ireland, because
> someone was having troubles with their unix. But I'm afraid I would never
> give a genuine email address to a news group now.

Judging by the E-mail address that I use here (newsgroups@schestowitz.com),
UseNet is an invitation for nuclear spam attacks. UseNet archives are
everywhere and they expose E-mail addresses.

> The same is true of some seemingly legitimate web sites, I always give an
> email address (I have an unlimited number) that reflect the site. For
> example theaa@mydomain or mybank@mydomain. It is a sad case that a lot of
> sites, despite claiming not to give your email addresses to third parties
> actually do give it away and once given there is a rapid rise in spam from
> many sources.

That's what I use another E-mail address for. I keep my primary address open
to just family, friends and colleagues.

Hope it helps,

Roy 

-- 
Roy Schestowitz
http://schestowitz.com

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