Spam

[#1]

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@Oldjim wrote:

Odd thing for me was that the vtwo email addresses which received them have never had them before but judging by the To box I wonder if a local government employee had has his address book grabbed

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I have being receiving SPAM to an email address that I uniquely setup for receiving Plusnet service announcements.  The address has never been used for anything else, nobody other than me and Plusnet should know it !

I will be so relieved when next year I'll hopefully be able to migrate to away from Plusnet to an ISP that does a decent job, and leave behind this pitiful shadow of what was once a great broadband provider, now that they have apparently given up on service, support, and now security.

 

[#2]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Oldjim wrote:

Odd thing for me was that the vtwo email addresses which received them have never had them before but judging by the To box I wonder if a local government employee had has his address book grabbed

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I have being receiving SPAM to an email address that I uniquely setup for receiving Plusnet service announcements.  The address has never been used for anything else, nobody other than me and Plusnet should know it !

 

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Hello.

@Spam goes in waves, and spammers for a past time have systems to create (or copy across ISPs/domains) email addresses. For example if one address exists on one domain (the bit before the @), then it could also exist on another domain. ISPs are especially prone to this. My spam traps have seen this over the years, as well as numbered email addresses, like a name followed by numbers - which many services suggested when users signed up for email.

Spammers also have addresses that might not actually exist, but send emails from their botnet anyway. All bounce messages end up at the spoofed email address in the spam run. So when the email is then "created", spam is automatically received.

Spammers also use dictionary type names, and all sorts of common names in their database of possible email addresses, hence the millions they could send to.

The email address needs to be a complete random set of letters and numbers, in any order, to hope to be spam free.

Naturally, the user also needs to have systems that are spyware/trojan free too

[#3]

@SpinDryer - The generation of random addresses like you suggest is much easier to generate, with little or no harvesting required. As a consequence there would then be a massive increase in the number of emails being sent, choking the Internet, so the sender had a better chance of hitting their target.

But what is the real answer, well that’s another topic. But I guess for those who run mail servers they should know what they are doing, as this isn’t always the case. Better security for PCs. But there is nothing to stop anyone firing up a server and sending it themselves on a temporary or high jacked system. One option might me to throttle the network, but that would affect genuine senders of bulk email. Sadly a true fix, whatever it is, if there even is one, may well be a long way off.