On Monday 31 January 2005 10:18 am, Mark Rogers wrote:
Has anyone actually found any vaguely reputable website or mailing list that has sold an address on?
Not really, well at least not since I started doing the catchall domain thing.
In order of the amount of spam they created here are the actions that did result in me getting spam.
Accidental posting to a newsgroup using my real email address, I did this once in a spate of drunkeness. Literally within a few weeks my spam intake went from nil to about 100 messages a week.....nasty but fortunately it was with an old (now discarded) BT Internet address.
A funny thing with BT Internet where I believe they were unintentionally leaking addresses. Whether it was an intentional leak or not I created a new mailbox as a test (called foofoo@btinternet.com I seem to remember) did nothing with it, gave the address to nobody and yet within a month or so it was getting spam. I sent the results of my tests to BT technical support but got the usual response I'd expect....none at all
Use of my email address on mailto: links on various websites, I don't do that much anymore (and if I did I would use some scripting to hide the address from harvesters now)
Some so called friend sending me one of those online greetings cards, resulted in a works email address going from nill spam to about 50 a week
All of these things are a bit coincidental so take the results with a pinch of salt. Now I get hardly any spam to my home address and half a ton a day to the work one (which is registered with all sorts of suppliers and customers so I have no idea how it got picked up)
Wayne