Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: OT: Spam protection

[BrowserUk]

So what?

Fair point I suppose. You get one, you respond, it illicites 10 more, you respond, it illicites 100, you respond....

You'll never see them granted, but you're sure wasting an aweful lot of cycles and bandwidth. Still, you'll probably never notice, so what the hey...

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Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller

[perrin]

Almost none of the spam that I get has a valid return address. If I sent responses to all of them, I think at least 95% of it would bounce. Spammers check validity of e-mail addresses with HTML mail that loads web-bug images, not by checking for responses. That's why the "take me off this list" address that they include sometimes (which is to troll for live addresses) is always a different address from the return address.

[BrowserUk]

I'm not quite sure that I understand this?

Isn't the location of the server serving and logging web-bugs just as tracable as the originating email address?

Isn't the ISP hosting the webbugs just as likely to be inundated with abuse complaints as the email provider?

What's the point in creating a throw-away email address to avoid tracability if your going to embed an equally traceable webbug url or "Please remove me from your list" url?

It seems that people still believe that spammers aren't only selfish {expletive}'s, but they are also stupid. People append _NOSPAM to addresses, or write them as "soandso AT thingame DOT net". Is there anyone here that couldn't write the regex to find and correct that?

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Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller

[perrin]

They don't use fake addresses to be untraceable. All spam ultimately tries to sell you something, so it has contat information of some kind in it somewhere. However, spammers know that many of the millions of e-mails they send will bounce, and they don't want the bounces. Also, the vast majority of the population still hits reply and sends a response like "take me off this list you bastard!" when they get spam. (I know this because a spammer once used an address of mine as a fake return address, and I received all of them.) The spammers have no interest in getting thousands of those either.