On Thursday 18 July 2002 17:42 CET Bart Schaefer wrote: >[...] > That is, somebody's harvesting those addresses, but somebody else who > bought a list of them will be sending the mail. That second somebody > might be two or three times removed from the original harvest and has no > idea where the addresses came from. The harvester already has his money, > and is busy grabbing more addresses to sell.
Definitely. So one point is to fight the symptoms (SpamAssassin), another to go against the disease (Spam) itself (the Spammer). The best way to fight the disease is to fight it's roots (the Harvester). > Thus I suspect that using spamtrap addresses is like arresting the > junkies while the cartel goes right on smuggling in the drugs. That's why I have the date, time and IP in the address; I compare them to my access.log and if they aren't forged (and the Harvester didn't use an anonymous proxy), I've got them. > Ever worse, it's plausible to think that randomly generated spamtrap > addresses may simply give the harvesters bigger lists to sell. You're > not going to discourage them that way. You're probably right. But if you feed the Harvester with many broken addresses, the Spammer will probably demand a better reviewed list the next time. If many Spammer do so, the I-make-a-quick-dollar-and-grep-many-many- sites-Harvesters will have to close their business (hopefully) and it might be possible again to publish an email address without being drowned in Spam immediately. To be true: In this case the address was not really a spamtrap but just a convenient way to give my visitors/customers/friends/whoever a way to contact me through a simple mailto link while it was still possible for me to shut down an address if it was harvested. Malte -- -- Coding is art. -- ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
