[Coco] No email address to stop spammers.

[Aaron Wolfe]

One "side project" of mine for the past several years has been a small spam
filtering service.   I've had the opportunity to solve the "spam problem"
for just about every kind of client you can imagine.  The sad fact is that
if you've had your email address for more than a couple years, it's very
likely that you'll find it on a list that can be purchased for practically
nothing and is in the hands of any spammer that wants it.

Scraping web pages for email addresses (except mail list archives of course
:( is really not that common any more.  The "good" spammers have much more
effective tactics.  Exploits in popular web sites that use email addresses
for logins (facebook, myspace, amazon, ebay, etc) have given out millions of
addresses.  On top of that, so many companies have inadvertently given out
their customer/marketing lists (and this will likely continue) that at this
point pretty much everyone has spam sent at them.   And in the past year or
so, we've actually seen a sharp rise in plain old dictionary attacks.. I
guess if your botnet is big enough, bandwidth is cheaper than brains.

The good news is that there are excellent tools available that do an amazing
job of stopping spam.  Most of the are open source/free too.  In truth, if
you have a problem with spam, it is your email provider's fault, regardless
of who you've given your address to or how many web sites it can be found
on.  There are many ISPs who simply don't make much effort to use the
technologies available to them.  It's understandable in a way, since they
operate on very slim margins and email is an expensive service to offer.  On
the other hand, there are plenty of free offerings that do a great job, so
maybe there is an element of laziness too.

Knowing that many people do have their email service with these ISPs, I
think it is probably irresponsible to  post these addresses on the coco
website, although sadly it probably is not going to make much difference
since these are old posts and these email addresses are almost certainly
already on spammer lists anyway.

As a side note, if anyone runs their own (personal/nonprofit/coco related)
domain and wants some tips/info on getting rid of spam, I have tons of
information and techniques that I've gathered.  Send me a note off list,
I'll help you practically eliminate this junk no matter how bad it is :)

-Aaron




On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 5:59 PM, KARL SEFCIK <cdiman7 at flash.net> wrote:

> Hi all, Don't know if this will get through, but some of the spam I get is
> an alpha-numeric generated address, I look in the address box, and see
> variations before and alphabetically after my addy, and that happens a lot.
> So my addy cdiman7 gets sandwiched between variations alphabetically before
> and alphabetically after it. By the time I got to reading these messages in
> this thread, I had deleted email like that. If the thread keeps going, and I
> remember, I will save the addressline to paste in a message here.
> Karl
>
> --- On Sun, 9/27/09, Darren A <mechacoco at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From: Darren A <mechacoco at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Coco] No email address to stop spammers.
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Date: Sunday, September 27, 2009, 12:33 PM
>
> On 9/26/09, Steve Bjork wrote:
> > It's too easy for spammers to pull "somebody at somedomain.com" as
> > "somebody at somedomain.com" and add it to their spam list.
> >
> > As for giving out the email address in the first place...
> >
> > I don't want spammers to get my email address if it is good.
> >
> ---
>
>
> Steve,
>
> Are you aware that every message you post to this list goes into a web
> archive with your e-mail address in the "somebody at somedomain.com"
> format?
>
> Check it out:
> <http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/2009-September/045254.html>
>
> Darren
>
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