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Ed Anderson wrote:
Hi Dale,
Don't know if your conclusion correct or not. I do know my e mail was
not only harvested but "Hijacked" in that it has been used by Spammers as
the origin for messages I certainly did not send. However, I get the
"bounces" from their use of my URL returned to me and indications that some
providers are now blocking my URL due to its use by the spammers. I am
convinced that the spammers got my e mail from a Yahoo list I joined. I
also noted in one case that a harvester had gotten into the address list of
my own service provider. My service provider is now blocking virus on its
on and fortunately I rarely see one that has not been "disabled" already.
So the fact that you might get a message from me containing Spam or worst
yet a virus, don't mean it came from me. I use Norton's anti-virus to scan
both incoming and outgoing mail and have a hardware firewall, so its very
unlikely it would come from me, but it could some from a spammer or others
that have "Hijacked" my e mail URL.
Frankly, I don't know what you can do about it. Switching URL is certainly
a pain.
It certainly is. I can add a little data on the hijacking side. Some people worry when they see this that somebody has taken over their account. The truth is that SMTP, the protocol used to transport e-mail between systems on the Internet, is inherently unsecure and does basically no checking of the source and target. You can make them anything you want - I could send you a message from Newt Gingrich and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference without a close examination of the message headers, which people rarely do.
What spammers are doing is an anti-spam-filter trick. Most spam filters "whitelist" the e-mail addresses at their own sites, so sending from, say, chad@somewhere.com to nicole@somewhere.com doesn't get filtered. Spammers thus use identical domain names on different accounts on their target lists to identify users at the same sites, then pick one at random as the source, and the other as the target. Unfortunately, it works more often than it doesn't which just encourages them to do it more.
As some people have pointed out, the only thing that will stop the junk is people not buying into it. Spamming works. People actually buy this cr....p.
I use a very aggressive spam filter at work, and change my private e-mail addresses (used for purchasing things online, among other things) several times a year. It helps a lot, but it's annoying as heck.
Regards,
Chad
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