email question

[thcri]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( re: Geez, don't most of these people (spammers) have real jobs...


You bet they do. They are full time spammers!!

90%+ of all email spam comes from companies that are setup to do this full time. They use bogus names and sometimes bogus email accounts. They also change ISP's on a regular basis so they won't get their email privs turned off. You may think it comes from different people but in reality it is coming from the same few corporate entities.
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Some of them even use your email account to send them out and you don't even know it. A company in our area was shut down by their ISP because of overloading the bandwidth. When approached about it was when they found out it was happening. Here a spammer got on the companies server and used it for sending out mail. Makes one worry some now doesn't it.

murph

 

[Junkman]

If you want to see a real surprise, then do a Google search for your e mail address. It will amaze you at what it will find. I just did mine and found a couple of hits including one which is a reply to a post on TBN. I am going to ask the moderators to edit my post and remove it. Also going to try to eliminate the rest of them....

 

[OhioTC18]

Yep.....my profile and one of my posts appeared /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

 

[BillyP]

Hey Junkman,

If you want another real surprise, do a Google search on your 10 digit phone # (if it's not unlisted)

 

[Inspector507]

A bunch of mine showed up on Google......and since when did TBN put a pop-up on your screen if you visit without logging in??

 

[Inspector507]

BillyP,
Got NO hits on that one /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[MadReferee]

List broker companies have software that does what you just did with Google. They compile the emails, catorgorize them based on where they were found, then sell them to anybody that wants to buy. List companies will also take a list of names and addresses (mailing list) and add different demographic info to the list, like email address, income info, children info, etc. All this info is publicly available somewhere either on the internet or someone's database. Three of the biggest list processors are Amex, Axciom, and MBNA.

You would be surprised at what info can be obtained on someone just from their name and address. A company I did some work for regularly sent their names to Axciom for demographic processing and used this info to target certain people for certain ad campaigns.

 

[Junkman]

I have done that one also.. I have also done my name and my business name and get hits on all of them. Whenever someone calls that is selling something, I just tell them that I had died. Last week it was my life insurance company needing some information. The woman replied "would you like us to send a claim form". I told her about my death being a "joke" and we both had a good laugh over it.

 

[trkbldr]

Many thanks to MadReferee and others who helped me solve the "automatic opening" feature. It now does exactly what I wanted it to do /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif.

 

[OkeeDon]

I did the Google thing on several of my email addresses, and got the same results, of course. Some of them, however, have more spam than others. The thing that amazes me, however, is that a couple of the accounts where I get the most spam have never appeared anywhere! For example, I set up a mailbox for my wife at my ISP, using her name and first letter of her last name as the address. She's never used it (she prefers Hotmail) and it doesn't appear in Google or anywhere else. Yet, that one gets more spam than any other I have.

I think what's happened is the ISP (it's adelphia.net, cable broadband) does not have good filters, and the spammers are simply trying most of the possible addresses that might work. Let's say the address is janed@adelphia.net (not the real one). The spam I get is addressed to janex, janeh, etc, but it all gets through.

I have 8 websites, all with POP3 email capabilities, 2 cable accounts (1 for home and 1 for office), and have various email addresses at each. I think I'm currently monitoring over 20 different email addresses, all through Eudora, because I like the way it looks and works better than Outlook Express. I have spam filters on all of the web sites, and various filters set on Eudora. I think I'm blocking (thus never seeing) several hundred spams a day. Because of the clever spam programmers, I still get about 100 a day that manage to bypass all the filters. I've gotten pretty good at highlighting blocks of them and deleting them quickly, so I spend less time deleting them than it tool to write this post.

About half of the various addresses get spam, and almost half never get any spam at all, and a couple get 80% of the spam, and I just can't figure the rhyme or reason behind it.