I’m guessing you haven’t had the ‘private’ address long - either that or there’s some filtering going on - perhaps at ISP level. Any email address that you use will eventually be targeted by a spammer, because using the address means sending it out across public servers.
I’m not sure this is the case. I have not heard of a spammer getting addresses by sniffing packets going across public servers. They usually get the addresses by searching websites, newsgroups, or getting you to sign up for things. I’ve also heard of viruses which send the addresses from your address book to the spammer.
So if you have a “private” address that you use carefully, you’re not guaranteed to get spam.
A good way to protect your email address is to use dynamically generated email addresses when signing up for something on the web. That way if the dynamic address gets stolen, you can disable it. Spamgourmet.com offers a service like that.
And the reason why it’s bad if the spammer knows you opened the mail is because then your email address becomes much more valuable. He knows it got through your spam filter and you looked at it. Spammers want lists of email addresses that they know are valid. By loading an image in the spam, they know the email is valid. More spammers will want your address and you’ll get more spam.
Also if you click a link in the spam, you can be tracked. Many times the link in the spam will have some sort of unique identifier. If you click the link, they know it came from an email they sent to your email address.
Even worse, the damned UN.
I’m pretty sure it happens, but in any case, there’s another way in which your email address gets widely and publicly distributed; glurge/chain letters/hoaxes and the like; the person who sent you the ‘forward this to all your contacts’ message also sent it to all their contacts; trouble is that they probably exposed your email address in the headers.
Even legitimate messages sent to legitimate distribution lists may include your address in the header that is visible to all recipients.
It only takes one copy of one of these messages to find its way to a compromised machine and your address is harvested, and you will start getting spam.
You don’t have ultimate control over how people send you messages - I suppose you could get around this by not giving out the mail address to anyone, but in that case… why have the mail address.
In fact, you only have to communicate with people - if one of them subsequently gets compromised by a mail harvesting trojan, then your address is vulnerable.
There’s no way to ‘carefully use’ an email address so as to guarantee (or even nearly so) that it cannot get on a spammer’s list, unless that careful use actually consists of non-use.
Yes, please stop that, annoying, unnessesary, and encourages unsafe emails.
Learn how to email using letters, numbers, symbols and spaces.
Yes, all those programmers, system administrators, and DBA’s are just terrified of change, which is why we don’t like HTML in our email. How observant.
You’re totally missing the point. The point is not that they have your ip address (which doesn’t do a whole lot for them), it’s that they’ve confirmed activity on that email address, which would otherwise be impossible. This means they not only know that you looked at it, but when, and how often. It doesn’t take a rocket scientest to point out that this will just flag your address for even more spam, which most people would agree is just annoying.
The worst: spam with stationery.
Skipped lightly over those English classes, did we, Doc? “College Professor” is not a proper noun, and does not merit capitalization any more than does “street sweeper.”
Nor, for that matter, does either use of “Computer Science.” cite