Re: [NTLK] Spam?

At 10:07 PM -0600 7/15/09, Grant Hutchinson wrote:
>On Jul 15, 2009, at 9:28 PM, William Ross wrote:
>
>> Is there some way that a spammer is harvesting emails from the list? I
>> have an account set aside for Newtontalk (keeps my mailbox clean),
>> that I haven't used anywhere else (and on a personal domain to boot).
>> I can see no other way for the spammer to get this address, unless
>> they've discovered MARC is a great way to harvest addresses and they
>> added code to interpret them.
>
>This is always a possibility. I have no control over the method of 
>address obfuscation that MARC uses, but it's a decent 
>implementation ... albeit rudimentary. Keep in mind that many spammers 
>simply compile enormous lists of canonicals (the unique name prefixing 
>the address) and domains, mashing all of the combinations together for 
>their mass mailings. It is possible absolutely possible to reconstruct 
>your email particular email from completely unrelated addresses
>scoured from the interweb.

FWIW, this has happened to me before with NewtonTalk. Which is why my current address has a 2 appended to it. (I shut down the original address and created the new one back when I noticed the problem.) I just checked and, indeed, I have one piece of spam sent to my new NewtonTalk address. Guess I'll go make a version 3 address. Hope they never notice the pattern. Maybe I'll wait until the volume of spam goes up.

I doubt Will's "ntlk" or my "lsynt2" usernames were arrived at by prefixing a common set of names to a common set of domains, so it does seem as if the list's email addresses have been compromised. More than once now.

Ah, I see the list archives are online and only use a simple "_at_" replacement for "@" to obscure email addresses. Likely they're just harvesting them from the archive.

- larryy

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Received on Thu Jul 16 00:45:13 2009