Hotmail.
I’ve had a hotmail account for years now and never once has it been spammed. Yippee!
Coldfire, what you are experiencing is the result of a type of “dictionary attack”. Basically a spammer emails every word and combination of words or numbers @hotmail. A very large percentage bounce, but the rest confirm themselves as valid addresses. Therefore they get included in the next spamming. And once the spammer has a list for @hotmail, they apply the same list to @yahoo, as it is likely to have the same words used for addresses. So you can get spammed without ever having used the mail account anywhere.
This spamming method could be defined as a “denial of service” attack, which are illegal. They are very similar as they involve flooding a service with useless data. I think either AOL or Microsoft have successfully prosecuted using this argument.
If you have to use hotmail, the best thing is to create a user account that isn’t a real word and is unlikely to be included in a dictionary attack.
*Coldie,
<<it’s in their TOS, but does anybody>>
So, you’re a Star Trek (The Original Series) fan, eh?
TOS is the official designation by Paramount for the '66 to '69 run of TV eps.
Derleth
Derleth evil person
My son signed up for a new hotmail account and within 24 hours, without him even having used it yet, it had 50 spams waiting for him.
Hotmail makes your information, including your email address, public on its site and on Infospace unless you specifically opt out.
I turn off popups in my browser’s preferences. Never get anything I didn’t click on. I don’t use IE, though. I think you can’t turn them off in IE unless you download a separate program. All the Mozilla based browsers I’ve tried let you turn them off.
As you are possibly aware, TOS is a commonly (well, I thought it was) used acronym meaning Terms of Service.
Damn - that was funny. Wolfman, you are officially excluded from my “Fuck you all” OP.
-FK