So I login to Snotmail for the email address I use for this board (yes, I don’t use my “real” and easily traceable email address), and what do I see? A barrel of moldy, stinking, fungi-sprouting spam.
How do these deepthroating electronic sheep fuckers manage to send spam to an address I have never listed anywhere else but the profile page on is Message Board? I see two or four possibilities:
1- A harvester program that browses threads and steals addresses. Has anyone noticed a spam increase that can be directly attributed to use of SDMB?
2- Snotmail is selling my address.
3- My address got ripped off from someone who compromised Snotmail.
4- They are out to get me. [nervous laugh] hahahehaheh [/nervous laugh], 57 varieties indeed…
As to snotmail . My account is full of porn spam . I block sender and the next time I check it it’s packed again . Which was one of the reasons why I stopped using it .
You know, I always hear horror of Hotmail, yet I’ve personally never had any trouble myself, after using it for years. All the “spam” I get is from sites that I registered to receive E-mails from (I even occasionally get some nifty things, although most of it is crap that I delete immediately).
My lack of troubles probably just makes yours all the more curiouser and curiouser.
I always open full headers, trace it back to it’s source, and mail spam@whatever, abuse@whatever, and webmaster@whatever, notifiying them of the problem.
The ones that gobble my nuts are the ones out of country. Japan seems to be big.
I have had several hotmail accounts over the years. Some have been utterly overrun with spam, and others have remained completely unscathed. Specifically, I have 2 hotmail addresses that I use right now, never given out anywhere, one getting spam, the other dry. Quite weird. Errrg. After reading the thread you referenced, SPOOFE, I can see I’ll never get to the bottom of it. I would be really interested to see the “disease vector” diagram, of how my email address got spammed, but that’s impossible.
Bill Gates, you rotten pavement stain.
Tim, once when I got spammed at my “real” email address, I forwarded the message to abuse@ispdomain.com, and the next morning I got an email saying the spammer’s account had been terminated. Quite satisfying. But these ones from Lebanon, fuck, there’s nothing to be done…
I think hotmail is slow, and it crashes very often trying to simply read or reply to messages, but I have never received spam of any kind on it. Strange.
I have a Yahoo account that I almost never use-- not even for this board. It’s basically my “emergency” account, to which I turn maybe once or twice a year when my work e-mail is down but I can still get online. All I ever get on that account is spam. Mainly porno and financial stuff. Yahoo has a bulk mail filter, but even the few that sneak by into my regular mailbox are complete crap.
My Earthlink account, which I pay for, also racks up spam at an alarming rate. I’ve noticed, though, that the porno offers have dropped off. Now it’s all “Find Anyone Anywhere!” and “One Million E-Mail Addresses!”’ stuff.
I’ve been running from this one particular fart-knocking gerbil-fucking shit for brains porn spammer for almost a year. I’ve had their email account closed countless times. They just reopen a new one.
I’m not a violent guy, but one day I’m going to find these fucks… shortly after that I’ll probably be going to jail for a very long time. Crock-procking bastiges.
I don’t get alot of porn, it’s always “Make 200000 bajillion dollars in 10 minutes!” or “Find anyone fast!” or “1 million email addresses!” “Exciting business opportunity” “You’ve won a trip to Hawaii!” type stuff.
.jn, .cn, .cx, and .ln are the worst. And there’s not shit you can do.
I have 2 hotmail accounts - one is fairychatmom, the other is my name with and underscore between first and last names. My name account gets all the garbage, and I’ve noticed that the other addressees are <different first names>_<lastname> in alphabetical order… I’m guessing that someone wrote a program to generate likely mailing addresses.
I’ve got a netscape account and 2 mail.com accounts that are not regular names, and they don’t get garbage.
Of course, my fairychatmom account gets little of anything - guess my buds don’t love me any more… <sigh>
I’ve not had much trouble with Hotmail over the years. I got in on the ground floor, early enough to snag a very common, 4-letter name with no appended numbers. Alas, I left it by the wayside, and it’s been claimed by another. Sigh.
Nevertheless, I work two Hotmail addys currently and while I get some spam, it’s not much–maybe 2 or 3 a week.
I do get an awful lot more now than I did before the Micro$soft buyout, but that’s probably more a matter of there being more spam to be had these days than maliciousness on MS’ part.
My work account is an .edu address. It used to be spam free, but lately, they’ve been creeping in. Not nearly so much as Yahoo or Earthlink, but they do show up. Either the university has a better filter than Yahoo, or maybe spammers don’t mess so much with .edu accounts.
The spam that’s not addressed to you is probably just "bcc"ed, blind carbon-copied. Your name & address won’t show up in the “To” field, but trust me, they meant to send you whatever garbage you’re reading.
matt_mcl is right, never reply to a spammer. You’ll only get more.
FairyChatMom, there are indeed insidious programs that will attempt to find common user names (johnd, anyone?), and compile them into a fresh spam list. Common names at large ISP’s (or AOL) can be targeted this way.
