Re: [stella] Re: [stella OT] Spam

Subject: Re: [stella] Re: [stella OT] Spam
From: Rob <kudla@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2004 23:21:35 -0400
On Friday 06 August 2004 21:00, Ruffin Bailey wrote:
> Though I suppose there are viruses that comb your entire hd
> for email addresses, correct?  

There are those, but more efficient are the viruses that just 
grab your entire Outlook address book, or scrape all the senders 
and recipients out of the mails in all your folders, or go 
through the IE cache directories (which would explain how 
someone got Erik's obsolete addresses.)

On top of that, there are spam spiders constantly going around 
the web collecting any email address they can find out of 
mailto: links and even anything in the a@xxx form.  It's really 
not necessary for the sender and the recipient to have appeared 
in the same place since even the viruses (at least initially, 
till their servers are shut down) usually send their harvested 
email addresses back to their creators.

The solution, if you can call it that, is to give out a different 
disposable address to everyone you can get away with.  I've been 
doing that for a few years now and as soon as I start getting 
spam to one of them, it gets forwarded into a black hole.  
Sadly, I do still have a few permanent "private" addresses 
which, thanks to these Outlook-crawling viruses, have been 
getting more and more spam lately.  One of those is the address 
with which I've subscribed to this list, since I wasn't making 
up a new address for everything yet at the time.

Rob


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