I am a hapless victim of unsolicited commercial email. One of the poor, non-anonymous masses whose email address is on every opt-out list known to man. I don’t really know how my email address got out there but I can think of a number of ways.
Usenet. Possible. Ages and ages ago (like 1998) I used to post to newsgroups with my email address naked as a jaybird. I don’t know if spambots are still looking that far back for potential victims, or if I’m just on really old lists.
Opting In on purpose. Unlikely, unless those bouts with temporary insanity, followed by amnesia, have returned.
Opting In involuntarily. Possible. Maybe I visited a message board somewhere where there is a little microscopic warning that says, “We reserve the right to sell your email address to multi-level marketers, Viagra salespeople, and mortgage refinancers”. This doesn’t really fit the spirit of Opt-In (i.e. informed consent), but I suppose it fits the letter since I couldda read the whole page.
Somebody Opting In for me. Maybe. Somebody might hate me.
Opting Out to one of those groups that sells your email address when you do this. Possible. I would never opt out if I didn’t opt in; I’d report the spammer to spamcop (I report dozens of UCEs to spamcop every week; it doesn’t help but I suppose I’m doing my bit for humanity). However, I might have mistaken a spammer for somebody I had done business with.
Cookies. Possible? I don’t know. I’ve read a lot about cookies and I still can’t figure out if you reveal your email address when a site sets a cookie (or gets it back). In any case my preferences are set to ask for each site I enter and I don’t allow cookies for 90% of the sites I visit).
Just visiting the site. Possible? Don’t know this either. My brother-in-law the prosecutor says lots of stuff I don’t believe (“They can find your name and address just by visiting the website!!!” and similar bulldinky.) A friend of mine says that’s not the problem so much as browser preferences (I’m using MS Internet Explorer) which automatically reveal your email address. Have checked those preferences and I can’t find my email address in them, but maybe I’ve missed it.
Their conclusion is that message boards (and they include Deja’s Usenet archive), AOL chat rooms and online lotteries are the worst offenders. This is followed by domain registrations and leaving your email address on your own website, with the low risk areas bring online shopping trips, opening free webmail accounts, free software registration, email newsletter subscriptions and online product registration.
The author does comments specifically the his test contradicts the conventional wisdom regarding free email accounts, particularly Hotmail.
Your email address can be harvested just because you used it. I have several email addresses which get no spam because I have never used them. Just use the a few times and they will get spam. When you send or receive email, the address is in the header, which goes through many servers which can read and harvest. . .
One method I use is while surfing do it with a screen name (on AOL one of your 7 screen names) that you have the email address turned off. You can goto preferences and set the email option to “OFF” that way if somehow they do get your email address you can’t receive any email there.
It’s really getting to be a problem and rather tiresome but I must delete at least 20 emails every day but I guess it’s just part of this wonderful age we live in.
Rather than get upset I just do the above or just keep deleting maybe someday they will get the message but I doubt it.
I must admit accociationally I do see something that interests me but like I say that is rarely.
“4. Somebody Opting In for me. Maybe. Somebody might hate me.”
They don’t hate you, they’re making a buck. This happens to me all the time. Last time, I went to the WHOIS lookup and found the Prez of the Co, and called him a f*cking spammer. He called me out and told me I’d opted in. I asked for credentials, and he supplied a BOGUS birthdate and a 5 year-old address, one that is only out there on my domain registration info. Once you’re in the meat grinder, you’re in there for good. Just block the annoying domains (I do it every day, takes about 2 minutes) and advise your friends to NOT send bulk emails with your name hanging out there.
I actually don’t know how to block anything. I know that blocking and filtering are different but that’s about all I know. I have about a dozen filters I created in Eudora; together they can catch about 40% of the spam. Actually, I wish I had statistics for which filter caught how many… Anyway, I have tried filtering for a couple of the offending servers [cough achinanet cough] but I haven’t caught anything that way (those emails are supposed to go in a special folder but I haven’t gotten anything). I did ask my ISP to block them and they haven’t gotten back to me…
ive been using my 2 main e-mails for over 2 years now and while nearly all my friends have changed theirs due to constant spam clogging inboxes, ive never had one single tripe e-mail offering me lots of things i dont want. ive registered on many sites with both, including message boards, job sites, and im on hotmail.
i dont have any blocking procedues in place i know of.
am i just lucky or do you have to have a certain handle to get this crap?
(not that i want it)
cheers
pauly t
I created a hotmail account to test a theory. I recieved no spam for a couple of weeks. Then I sent one email to my SO at work. The next day I got 1 spam e-mail. It’s now 6 weeks later, I get about 5 emails a week, all spam. The SO was asked not to reply so it’s not her.
The handle is all English words (infact, it’s someone on the SDMB) - So I figure my sending one e-mail triggered/was logged or something.
Or it could be that hotmail leak lists of new registered addresses.
A cookie shouldn’t be able to reveal your email address, unless you’ve typed it into a form on that site, in which case it may well be stored. In any case, cookies can only be accessed by the domain that creates them, so the information can’t be stolen by another website.
You can view the contents of your cookies on your PC in a directory called “cookies” somewhere in the “windows” or “winnt” directory (the exact location varies depending on what version of Windows you have).
Thanks, refusal. Unfortunately I am using an Apple from the 15th century (actually the mid-90s), but I’m sure I can find the cookies file as soon as I get the un-lazy enough.
I don’t know if this is a good enough question to warrant its own thread, so I figure I’d append it here.
Most spam I get seems to have the following bit of hypertext markup gobbledygook:
I actually use it as a trigger for one of my more succesful filters, but I still wonder[ul]
[li]What does it mean?[/li][li]Is it like to be included on any non-spam email?[/li][li]Could it be specific to a type of spam (say, a particular victim list), or is it some ordinary html?[/li][/ul]
The question’s been nagging me for a while. I even posted a question on one of the spamcop newsgroups about with no luck. Google had the phrase in abundance but no explanation of it per se.
Dang it! I just accidentally filtered a message from a friend of mine with “stuff for pete base” in the html. It was a photo of a kitten with two ducklings. I caught it before deleting, but I guess that answers my question of whether or not it will appear in non-spam.
These are two lines that must be present in any valid XHTML files:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Yeah, I’d agree. <x-html> isn’t anything I’ve seen in the way of valid tags (I know my way around plain XHTML a bit) so maybe it’s a badly-formatted comment.
Well, here is a chunk of the full headers and html source on a recent spam:
It always seems to be the first line and the “<x-html>” thingy always seems to be there (it caught eight of the nine spam emails I got in the last 20 hours). Maybe it’s some weird kind of faux html, to try make a chunk of characters invisible to spamvictims who don’t show source?
I’ve found that on the one account that I’ve only given as a “contact” for the two sites I wanted e-mail from - ebay and the Offical X-files message board- I’ve gotten virtually no spam mail. I’ve been using that account since October and have gotten exactly two spam mails on it: out of 1500 or so e-mails received on it. The junk name I sign up everything under gets over 100 a week…I surf every site imaginable using that account, and aol doesn’t seem interested in selling that address. So my advice is start an account to be the sacrifical lamb, and if you ever have to give out your e-mail address to sign up for a site, use that address alone. Oh, and on aol, if you don’t have a profile, that makes it more difficult for aol spammers to find you, as well.
