I just saw an email address listed in the style of the above subject (I made this address up, like you didn't guess). It was a contack on a site and included instructions to remove the .nospam part before using.

Whether true or not, this indicates to me that maybe there are automatic spammer robots just looking for email addresses. Comments? Does anyone know the advantage of doing this since I am just guessing.

(On a bad day my wife gets more spam than email. I suspect because of her on-line business.)

Gary

Originally posted by projo
Whether true or not, this indicates to me that maybe there are automatic spammer robots just looking for email addresses. Comments? Does anyone know the advantage of doing this since I am just guessing.

You think ??

there are all kinds of crawlers (or robots) all over the web, you will see allot of .nospam in emails expecially in Userner forums, where emails gets grabbed left and right by crawlers :(

There are most definitely spambots at workl harvesting addresses. They get them from Usenet and alternate newsgroups (I wish I had known before I started posting years ago), domain registrations, and web sites. There are ways of protecting addresses from being harvested from web sites. Ojce you get on someone's lsit, you never get off. They just sell it to others (those CD's spammers sell with millions of addresses) and the amount of spam keeps on increasing.

You can block some of the spam with filters and using a host that blocks it at the server level.

One partial remedy would be a national anti-spam law that makes possession, distribution, sale or use of these harvested addresses illegal, and imposes stiff fines, along with other anti-spam measures.

Once there is a financial downside to small time spammers (court costs usually put the big ones out of business), I htink you'll find spamming will decrease substantially.