Food For Thought

[barry]

>Subject: [G4] Food For Thought     WAS: Re: [G4] Fix for Image Spam?
>Date: Fri, 26 Mar 04 13:08:16 -0500
>From: Don <dtownhome at earthlink.net>

>> I still get a LOT of spam.

>I too have earthlink as you can see.  My account has several email
>addresses and we have found it very i nteresting that one of them
>gets almost NO spam whatsoever while others regularly seem to get
>varying amounts.

i am with netcom which was bought by mindspring which was bought by
earthlink.  during the mindspring days they allowed us to get additional
email addresses via their webmail system.  i got an address and NEVER used
it before earthlink took over.  still haven't.  got it to make sure someone
else didn't grab the user name, as it's a popular name.

within a few months i started to receive spam.  now i get about 10 a day.
thank goodness for earthlink's spamBlocker 'high' setting--it catches 100%,
as i have no addresses in my address book!

this email address could not have been harvested by spammers in the usual
fashion--from lists, postings, forwarded emails, people sending mail to me
and others not using BCC:, crawling the web, etc.  spammers simply took the
(popular) username, attached it to every ISP's domain name they could find,
and started sending bulk mail in the hopes that some of the spam would get
delivered.  which works for the spammers.  therefore, until i get an
anti-spam program, i won't be using that address.

>It seems that perhaps addresses with 2 initials
>+ a last name are very bad news while less 'obvious' addresses are
>more difficult for spammers to find.

probably.  some of my other email addresses, including some other .mac
addresses i have, get no spam, some get a bit, but no addresses get as much
as my netcom and mindspring addresses.  the older the address the more spam
i've found.  the nigerian fee spammers/scammers seem to get every address
tho, even the addresses the viag-- spammers miss!

--barry
http://www.NationwideCashFlowSolutions.com
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