Where does my spam come from?

[jme]

Not exactly a Linux tip, but it's one that I usually use to see where spammers are getting my email address from...

If you own your own domain with email, most will give you unlimited forwarding email addresses that will forward to your mail webmaster / admin / user email address. When I sign up for a forum / online anything I use the email address sitename@mydomain.com.

Then if I get any spam emails I can work out where the spammers got the email address from - plus you can cancel the forwarding there-and-then.

So if it was for this site and it was me I would use linuxfoo@jamiedavies.org. If I then got any spam emails I would know that the spammers got the address from this site or the webmaster had sold the addresses to them.

Jamie.

[beezlebubsbum]

Hey Jamie,
In Australia, they just introduced an anti-spamming act. Apparently, if you put "no spam" next to your email address, then they are not allowed to spam it (by Australian law). Also, companies that are advertised in the spam will also be prosecuted, and large fines/jail terms apply! So I think people are tolerating spam less, nowadays.

[di||itante]

Thats a good idea and would tell you who were the bad guys etc...but ultimately, what could you do about it? Who would really care besides you, and you still have to prove it. It is unfortunate that spam is so out of control.

I think the best solution is a spamfilter on the server side ond one on the client side. Between the two it is controlable.

Mike

[distrodawg]

Personally, I don't concern myself much with spam. I apply filters via my email clent which move everything coming from an unrecognized address into seperate folders, so I can check it out at my convenience. If I get a lot of crap from one email address, I use it to sign up at a site I know will send lots of spam. Sending spam to the spammers seems to confuse them. If the email comes from a free email provider, like hotmail, yahoo..., you can complain to the provider. Since all the free providers have no spamming provisions in their agreements, they'll terminate any account which receives spam complaints.
In general, I think computer users have the wrong idea about spam. On one hand, it is a drag to wade through all the junk mailings to find the messages you want/need to read. On the other, that's why we have sender addresses and subject lines. If you don't recognize one or the other of these two things, just ignore the message. If I go to the library, I have to wade through 1000s of books to find the one I want. I sometimes have to read parts of them to decide which one will be most useful. I don't demand that the librarian get rid of any book I don't need. The cost of a free/low cost medium which allows anybody to communicate anything to anybody who'll listen is that not every communication will be something you want to see. At least you don't have to leave your desk to get your mail! I get a ton of unsolicited snail mail daily. I have to actually physically handle this mail, create more physical trash... If you think you'll ever use the internet for commercial gain of your own, you'll have to get used to the idea that many people are using the net for this same purpose. As a rule, people only use methods which work. It logically follows that spam must work for some marketers. Now, I don't defend spammers. I hate seeing bandwidth and storasge space wasted, but I heartily defend the rights of any marketer to try to sell me anything they want. It's unrealistic to assume that we can ever wipe out spam, and, if we do, it's unrealistic to assume that the internet will remain free. Someone has to pay the price for all the valuable free content we can receive. Even cable television has commercials! All of the fuss made is forcing governments to take irrational, half-assed measures to try to stop spam. I know many businesses have a huge problem with spam flooding their mail systems, but many of these same businesses receive massive commercial gain from their internet presence. For my commercial endeavors, any mail I receive from an unknown sender is auto-replied with a message that asks the sender to tack on a particular pice of info in the subject line. Most spammers don't waste their time with this sort of thing. They make their money off of impulse responses, not by answering email queries.I've never had a spammer resend mail with a subject line which would avoid my filters. Businesses still have to sort junk mailings sent via snail mail. Why shouldn't they need to deal with unsolicited email, too. We're asking too much from a really amazing tool. I'm sure some enterprising group will be delighted to market internet service which won't accept mail from anyone not on a "trusted" list. After all, you can already pay for software on your machine, or at the ISP level which blocks content you don't want to receive. In the end, it promotes a form of censorship, which cheapens the entire internet experience. What if group a decides, among its millions of members, that irc is a waste of intenet bandwidth, or that people use it to share info and files which are objectionable? Should they be able to wipe out irc? What about newsgroups? The second we start trying to stop some form of content or another on the internet, we open the door to mass censorship. Pretty soon, all the bitching about "spam" could have the unintended result of taking the internet from a "global community" to an exclusive club. Then we'll have less spam, and less CONTENT. Advertising exists for a reason. We need to learn to cope at the user level, or we're going to end up with tight-assed beaurocrats deciding what is okay for us to see and share on the net.

[beezlebubsbum]

To tell everyone the truth, I really don't get spam. It is weird too, because my isp doesn't have any anti-spamming controls, and I am not using any of my own. I also am an active member of the internet community, and it would be really hard not to stumble across my email address somewhere or another. Weird that.