archive.info-cyrus web site used for spam harvesting

Jim Levie jim at entrophy-free.net
Wed Oct 6 00:44:07 EDT 2004


On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 10:14, Lari Huttunen wrote:
> On 10:35:40 05/10/2004 lst_hoe01 at kwsoft.de wrote:
> > You should never ever use your real mailaddress for mailing-lists.
> > Create a alias for this purpose and only use it for mailing-lists.
> 
> Certainly. That's exactly what I have done. 
> 
> > If it gets to spammy, change it. 
> 
> But that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people out 
> there who don't have the luxury of disposable email aliases.
> 
> > Address-harvesting is done in many ways today like subscribing to
> > mailing-lists to get the addresses, so hiding it in the web-archives
> > don't save you from spam.
> 
> No, but in this case the cause and effect relationship very clear. Why make
> it so easy for the spammers to gain functional email addresses 
> 
> through web archive harvesting?

The address could have been harvested just as easily by one of the
windows spyware/malware packages from some poor benighted user's PC. And
I've had experiences with certain very highly restricted (by invitation
only) mailing lists that tends to support that theory. I know for
certain that the the address could not have been harvested from an
archive, either because no archive exists or because the archive can't
be reached from the Internet. And since the address was created
specifically for that list and not used for anything else the appearance
of spam in that inbox within 24 hours suggests that it was probably
harvested by spyware/malware.
-- 
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed
RedHat.


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