11 replies to this topic

[lister]

What I mean is that someone filled in my email capture form.

Out of curiosity I googled the email and it comes up as being a well know spam bot email address. However, I had already replied to the spam email thinking it was a real customer.

My question is, what would likely happen next? Would the bot then add my email (that I replied from) as being a "real email" and then I get heaps of spam?

Or will I get blacklisted for having communicated with this spammer?

Just curious thanks

[Jill]

Most likely you'll be thrown in jail and tortured because replying to spam is a worldwide offense.

[lister]

Most likely you'll be thrown in jail and tortured because replying to spam is a worldwide offense.

*packing suitcase* OK! No time to say goodbye am rushing out the door!

Seriously though, I was thinking more (out of curiosity) how the spam bot operates - I guess that they join capture forms to get replies from real email and real people that they then add to their "good email list"

Am I on the right track here?

My fault though - my form doesn't have a captcha....need to add that.....

[lister]

PS Ive been a member here for 6 years - i just noticed!!

Congrat for the consistent great forum.

[piskie]

Replying to Spam gets you on the confirmed list.
That list of about a million or so confirmed addresses sells for a higher price.
However the upside is that the quality of the Spam that you get inundated with will be a far higher quality.
Probably more convincing and tempting as well.

[torka]

Well, there ya go -- from now on you'll only get "premium" spam.

--Torka

[lister]

Well, there ya go -- from now on you'll only get "premium" spam.

--Torka

It'll be kinda obvious though what premium spam i get now b/c i just now opened that email account so the next spam that makes it through will be from that particular lovely person.

I wonder if spam will ever be stopped?

[chrishirst]

I don't see any spam anymore, with a combination of no catchall email, SpamAssassin on the server, K9 on my machine and Outlook filters catching anything they miss it never sees light of day.

[piskie]

Very impressive armoury Chris.
How much innocent mail do you estimate gets killed by friendly fire ??

[lister]

I don't see any spam anymore, with a combination of no catchall email, SpamAssassin on the server, K9 on my machine and Outlook filters catching anything they miss it never sees light of day.

Jeeeez. Fort Knox.

PS Surely some innocent mail must get caught up no?

Like what if someone was contacting you for a genuine opportunity? I guess they can pick up the phone or snail mail but I like to keep my email (mostly) open so that if someone does want to get me for legit reasons - they can.

[chrishirst]

The messages flagged as junk/spam are put into holding/quarantine folders which I will go through once a month or so and 'whitelist' any false positives. This also gives me a "ham/spam" collection to use for training SpamAssassin's Bayesian filters on the servers which helps reduce the spam that the hosting clients get.

I collect mail from several whois listed addresses and 'support@' addresses, so at one time I was getting around two thousand messages a day of which ~90% were junk, now it's down to ~500 a day with only 2% to 3% that are 'phishing' or other junk.

Draconian measures they maybe, but for me, it works.

[chrishirst]

Like what if someone was contacting you for a genuine opportunity?

I've yet to see one that came in from a random email

For all the forums, "social sites" etc. I am a member of, I have forwarders/aliases for a specific email ID relevant to each website that go to a mail box that has a name that is unlikely to be guessed at, and each alias is whitelisted through the filters. So I know where a message originated and whether it may be something useful or worth pursuing.

Should one get compromised in some way I can change the compromised email at the site and delete the forwarder so the spam goes nowhere.

I have been "online" almost before there was anywhere to be online to, going back to the days of Compuserve and UUnet with newsgroups and text only bulletin boards, so I am no stranger to unwanted junk messages and how to deal with them