Strange Spam

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
17,497
Location
USA
It is very strange that I received spam on an account that was never published. How did the crooks get my e-mail address?
 
Guessing, dictionary attack, testing all possibilities?

Is it a long e-mail address, or only a few letters before the @ sign?
 
It is my SF username @domainname.com. In case anyone is thinking that there is an SF-related issue, it is not an e-mail address used for notifications from this forum.
 
Spammers commonly send to every Email address that they can construct using any permutation and letters, numbers, and names that they can think of.

What's interesting, to me, is that I created a email address Nul@comcast.net intending it for situations where I was required to supply a legitimate Email but I didn't ever want to deal with any response -- Everything gets deleted without opending. What I found though that it immediately started collecting massive amounts of spam, virus/trojens; phishing attacks addressed to everyone, but me, as if Comcast uses that as a default address if the address is invalid. I was spending hours a day DL'ing many hundreds of spam. It was rediculous. I had to kill the account.
 
Well, that is crap. :( I capitulated and closed the account.
 
When I was with Comcast I had an address I never used. I checked it once when they claimed they sent something there and there were thousands of spam emails in it.
I'm guessing spammers just send every possible permutation to all the popular domains.
 
There was an article featured at Slashdot a while ago where they showed that e-mail addresses that started near the beginning of the alphabet received more spam than those that started near the end of the alphabet. Least affected were those starting with numbers.
 
I don't think they have to be popular. My domain, which is more or less unadvertised, gets 2K+ spams per day. Nearly all are for accounts that don't exist.

Now, as some bogus accounts get lots of spam I think some people have signed up for crap using bogus emails at my domain, but that doesn't account for nearly all of it.

Also funny is that 1-2% of the spam isn't in English; most of that is Chinese/Japanese with the occasional ones that look like Cyrillic.

Outlook's junk mail filter catches about 97-98% of it; the rest is an easy cleanup.
 
My entire domain is dumped to a single mailbox (anything@ddrueding.com goes to me). I deal with less than one spam a week, and I can't remember the last false positive. Google rocks.
 
There was an article featured at Slashdot a while ago where they showed that e-mail addresses that started near the beginning of the alphabet received more spam than those that started near the end of the alphabet. Least affected were those starting with numbers.
I can see that. If I let a bunch-o-spam accumulate in my junk mail box, it is definitely slanted towards the beginning of the alphabet. I'd say A-M get 70% or thereabouts.
 
Ha! I hatres those spammin measages too. I don;t awnt to add any more "inchje" to meanhood or take pils for a 4 hours hardon. Sheeesh.
 
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