Mike says in the article: "One potential solution to this would be to require every outgoing email to have a verified identifier of some sort, so that any email can automatically be traced back to the original sender." -Declan --- Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 09:56:33 -0800 To: declanat_private From: Mike Masnick <mikeat_private> Subject: My Short Life As An Unintentional Porn Spammer Hi Declan, Not sure if this would be interesting to folks on the Politech list, but since the issue of spam comes up fairly often, and this is a different sort of spam attack that people are increasingly facing, I figured I'd pass it along. It's a piece I wrote after being "slammed" by a porn spammer who put my email as the reply-to in a series of porn spams - meaning that I can now answer the questions "who replies to spam?" and (should anyone ever wonder) "what are the hundreds of variations on bounced messages?". -Mike http://www.techdirt.com/fotr/20030211/0230225_F.shtml My Short Life As An Unintentional Spammer by Mike Masnick Ever wonder what sorts of emails end up in a spammer's email database? Want to know who actually responds to spam and what they say? Want to know the myriads of formats (and languages) a bounced email message can take? I can now tell you all of this. Without my knowledge, I recently became an accidental porn spammer. When I got home one evening a few weeks ago, I noticed that I had more than the expected amount of email waiting for me. A quick glance through the inbox showed about fifty "bounced" emails - saying that email addresses of people I had emailed did not exist. The problem with this, of course, was that I hadn't actually emailed anyone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Feb 12 2003 - 08:30:48 PST