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[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

Makes no difference.

Yes it does. Clueless people have to INTENTIONALLY send me copies of
their posts since they have to edit the email address. They also have to
edit it to remove my obvious request that they do not send me copies.
Without the munged email address I'd get emailed copies more than 50% of
the time. With it, I get them less that 0.5% of the time.

 

[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

My idea is to surround the mailto: link with hundreds of fake addys.
Just put them in a division which is hidden from view.
As I understand it, they have to remove bad addies by hand.
They don't want their prescious addy getting shut down because of hundreds
of returned mail notices.

As usual, your understanding is mired in the mid to late 90s and is
completely outdated and wrong.

Spammers don't give a **** about invalid addresses. They send billions
of emails via botnet machines. Bounces and rejections simply do not
matter. For example, if you have access to a mailserver, you will see
thousands and thousands of attempts to send emails to *OBVIOUS*
message-id "addresses".

For example, just looking at my mailserver right now, there is the following:

Jun 23 18:36:38 mail postfix/smtpd[18545]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[187.243.221.81]: 550 5.1.1 <z05101208b869b2edf639@*munged*.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown; from=<[email protected]> to=<z05101208b869b2edf639@*munged*.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<customer-CLN-221-81.megared.net.mx>
Jun 23 18:38:09 mail postfix/smtpd[18114]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from r186-54-190-119.dialup.adsl.anteldata.net.uy[186.54.190.119]: 550 5.1.1 <22850ceb-e06f-dd18-9eb4-003065ab9b0e@*munged*.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown; from=<[email protected]> to=<22850ceb-e06f-dd18-9eb4-003065ab9b0e@*munged*.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<r186-54-190-119.dialup.adsl.anteldata.net.uy>

 

[Denis McMahon]

No amount of surrounding text (that's all HTML is, after all) will
prevent a bot from finding "mailto:[email protected]".

This is Richard. He read something somewhere that was claimed to be the
case 15 years ago, and because he read it and nothing ever changes it
must be true now.

Richard has an uncanny ability to determine whether what he reads on the
internet is correct, except that in Richard's case, it works backwards -
so the less accurate it was, the more convinced he is that it is
eternally true.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Lewis wrote:

Fascinating assertion. In 15 or more years of using newsgroups I've
gotten perhaps 6 emails from them.

Been my experience as well, maybe 10.

 

[Christoph Michael Becker]

No amount of surrounding text (that's all HTML is, after all) will
prevent a bot from finding "mailto:[email protected]".

What richard is actually talking about, is to add a lot of fake email
addresses in addition to the real one. This technique is advertised by
several sites (for instance
<http://www.robietherobot.com/spamfight.htm>). However, I am not
convinced that it actually would help to reduce spam[1]. And of course
only fake email addresses should be used, that are guaranteed to *never*
be used as real addresses.

[1] I assume that none of the email addresses collected by bots are
considered "precious" until they are verified.

 

[Gene Wirchenko]

Been my experience as well, maybe 10.

And mine. I occasionally get an E-mail. Usually, it is someone
posting a reply to the RISKS List on a post of mine who copies me. It
is WAY under 0.5%.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

 

[Denis McMahon]

[1] I assume that none of the email addresses collected by bots are
considered "precious" until they are verified.

What richard is referring to as "precious" is the address he thinks the
spammer is sending the emails from.

He seems to think that spammers are worried somehow that their sending
email account will be shut down if they try and mail lots of fake
addresses.

This completely overlooks the fact that most spam emails are sent by
botnets, and often either contain links to fake financial websites on
other botnets, or malicious software payloads, or links to shady
pharmaceutical or sex businesses operating on hosting servers that don't
give a toss about their clients buying advertising from spammers as long
as they see income for server rentals.

 

[Lewis]

Indeed. 50% copies of usenet posts is as likely as hens teeth (which
apparently are not completely non-existent.

Depends on the groups you post in. For a period of time, at least one of
the Microshit programs defaulted to emailing copies of every post, as I
recall. Windows Live v15 perhaps?

 

[Lewis]

[1] I assume that none of the email addresses collected by bots are
considered "precious" until they are verified.

90s thinking again. They don't care, and they don't verify.

--
the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of
humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different
ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been
different. For sheep are stupid and have to be driven. But goats are
intelligent and have to be led. (Small Gods)