On Saturday 29 January 2005 10:57 am, Tim Green wrote:
There is flaw in this scheme - what if you want to continue receiving email on that address? Spammers find your email address in the ALUG archive, you block it, then you never receive another ALUG email again.
It is useful to use different email addresses for different websites to help notice which ones leak to spammers, but you're still going to need a good filter.
Yes this is very true, I do it out of interest and so that I can answer the "how the hell did they get my address" question. But it only has a very small value when it comes to actually blocking spam. You could of course write some new spamassassin rules to add weighting to addresses that have been 'leaked' (or do any of the popular mail filters take the To: header in to account when training ?)
One side effect is that spammers seem to have clicked on to the catchall domain idea and (at least on my work email domain) I now get spam addressed to random_string@domain.com or common_name@domain.com. So having a catchall domain can actually increase the volume of spam you receive.
At home the only spam I seem to get is addressed to my email address as harvested from the Alug archives, but this is super minimal (say 3 a week, sometimes little periods of more). This is unavoidable if we want the archives to be unmolested and publicly available as has been discussed before.