On Monday 31 January 2005 12:26 pm, Chris Green wrote:
To be honest the amount of junk mail I get is not so enormous that it's worth huge efforts to get rid of it. I do filter a bit using procmail. I have a couole of explicitly blacklisted addresses, I split out all my mailing list mail and then I mark anything not explicitly To: or Cc: me as junk, I just glance through the subjects hitting 'd' as I go. Using mutt makes deleting mail fast and easy.
Another thing worth mentioning is that a lot of spammers are only in the business of collecting/buying/selling harvested addresses.
These people will generally obtain a list of "unverified" addresses (i.e. ones that may or may not lead to a dead/forgotten account) and turn them into verified ones (i.e. ones where there is a reasonable chance of a human reading them)
The verified address lists are worth £££ on the spam market, this is why it is always a bad idea to follow unsubscribe links on spam, you prove that the address is valid.
However consider that an out of office autoreply that goes to a valid reply address (quite rare with spam but it does happen) or a broken mail client that can follow links to external images etc also essentially proves that the address is valid and mail sent to it is being read. In theory at least those things can get your address from the "unverified" lists to the "verified" ones and trust me that's a place you don't want to be.