Is SDMB renewal email responsible for spam I receive?

About This Message Board
1

I recently established myself with a new ISP and email provider. This provider allows me to set up several email mailboxes.

Since my previous email box somehow got on several spam lists, and was sent sophisticated spam (same content, but randomized sender/ip, so difficult to set a rule to block), I thought that since I am starting out fresh, I’d make an email mailbox solely for registering on the various websites I frequent. That mailbox would not be used for anything else.

I did so, and changed my Straight Dope address-of-record to the newly created mailbox when I recently renewed on the SDMB.

Then I never got around to changing my other website registrations.

So the new mailbox has been used for only one thing, ever…the SDMB confirmation email.

That mailbox has been receiving approximately one piece of junk spam each day, from random return addresses.

Another mailbox I created for a different purpose, from the same provider, at roughly the same time, has never been used, and remains mercifully empty.

From this I conclude that somehow giving the Stright Dope board my new email box has caused me to receive unwanted spam. Is that a reasonable conclusion?

Why would this be so? Malfeasance, error, accident? I think I like skullduggery, if I get to choose a word. :slight_smile:

Can anything be done to get my unique email address removed from the spammer’s lists permanently, or is this a case of “make a new address and lose the one you have memorized”?

Have others experienced this problem?

Sailboat

2

In many cases, a completely clean Email address will still get random hits. This is especially true for any of the major domain names.

Examples:

UserName@comcast.net
Bob@Aol.com
someone@Att.net

etc.

It is probable that it is not the fault of the SDMB as if they actually sold your Email address, you would now be getting more than 1 spam per day.

Jim

3

What What said.

Quoting from the Rules, which you may read for yourself in entirety by clicking on the “Rules” hyperlink or going here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/rules.php?

We will send you email when needed for confirmation purposes (when you make your initial registration to the board and when you change your email address or password). We will send you email during the subscription drive if you have not resubscribed and your subscription is about to expire (this mostly applies to Charter Members). A rare time or two in our history we have sent bulk email to all our members but it takes something pretty huge to trigger such an event.

And that’s pretty much it. We do not sell or give your email address to others. We do not send you spam.

4

When Demon was my provider I was swamped with spam so I changed my account and domain name to (new domain).demon etc. I didn’t use the email address and within a day I was getting tons of spam. I can think of no other explanation than my address was sold or leaked by demon or their employees unless they were spamming every combination of possible domain names and then adding my name to them.

They too promised not to do this in their conditions. Promises are cheap.

5

My personal mail server receives thousands of spam attempts each day, and a lot of them are simply recipient name guesses where the spammers will try multiple combinations of common words and names. So, while Demon may have sold your name, it’s probably more likely that the spammers finally guessed an active recipient.

The amount of spam out there is mind-boggling. Looking at the logs of my work mail server for the past 45 days, for example, we’ve had over 17 million message attempts, and we’ve blocked over 13.5 million as spam. A good number of those are random name attempts.

Looking at the e-mail address you have on file, Sailboat, I’d say that’s probably what happened with your account.

6

I have two e-mail accounts. One is a G-mail account that has never gotten a single piece of unwanted mail (not even in the spam filter.
The other is a comcast.net, and although it dosen’t get very much, it does get some. It waxes and wanes for no obvious reason. It didn’t increase after my renewal

7

G-mail aggressively stops spam, Comcast I know from experience, does not. I have 4 Comcast accouts and I will get the same piece of spam with just an altered sender to 3 out of 4 most of the timeand sometimes all 4.

8

Thanks, that’s obviously what must have happened. I thought of it as a reasonably obscure address for someone to guess, but of course high-speed computing power would eventually generate it.

Strangely, one of my other accounts from that same provider is a much more common single word, but hasn’t (yet) been spammed.

Sailboat

edit: No skullduggery? Bah!

9

I’ve opened email accounts on my website, never to use them, and they still collect spam.

I’ve tried an experiment. I opened a new email account, spam@mydomain.com, and will check it again as soon as possible for spam.

10

I use a gmail address exclusively for message board correspondence. I’ve never received any spam at that address.

GT

11

I used to have a catch all address at my business domain. any mail sent to my domain, even if the user name didnt exist would go straight to me anyway. I had to stop doing that because I was getting hundreds of spam messages a day

Yes, the spamers take a domain name and have random email name generators that just cycle through likely possibilities to see what names are valid. I’d get the same spam message 50 times with slight variations on the username.

12

I checked back and even some of the email boxes that have been opened a year without being used have no spam. The one that had spam was on my webmaster’s page which could be read by a spider.