[Lowfer] Getting Spammed?

[JD]

>>> Wouldn't matter, your address is all over the web.  ....  I found all 
>>> the groups I could post to using your address in slightly longer than it 
>>> took me to type your address.
....
At that time spammers used random character generators, tossed spam out and 
saw what stuck.  ....  By the end of the week, this new unused account had 
nearly a thousand spam messages in it. >>>


Kurt is correct.  Spammers are terribly resourceful in creating their 
address lists.  Even if we never gave out our addresses at all, that 
wouldn't stop the problem.  So, why are we not all totally swamped with 
automated junk every day?  Mainly because e-mail service providers spend a 
lot of their time recognizing keywords and addressing patterns that identify 
a message as spam; and they also quickly learn where new spam attacks are 
coming from, and refuse mail from those machines.

Unfortunately, the blacklists used by legitimate e-mail handlers are 
sometimes over-aggressive.  If I reply to too many posts on this reflector 
in a given span of time, I sometimes end up on one of those lists because 
there's an unspoken assumption in the industry that all e-mail groups are 
spam waiting to happen.  It makes e-mail a very poor tool for handling 
legitimate business, because you never know when a crucial piece of 
information isn't going to get through.  But without such protections, I 
suppose we'd all be so swamped we'd never find our real messages among all 
the junk anyway.

John