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Unfortunate reality of the Internet Posted by Ari [Email]  (#2847) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Ari) on Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:02:17
In Reply to: ot> and kind of embarassing...., kooch, Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:57:20 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
There are at least two ways to get onto some pretty bizare mailing lists without sigining up-
The first is that there are lists of email addresses bought and sold. These are complied from various sources - legitimate visits to legitimate websites, stolen addressess (as has happened to AOL, etc.), and robotic address 'harvesters'. You can visit a website and provide an email for totally legitimate purposes. That website sells the list to another site for the equally legitimate purposes (read the Privacy notice on most websites). But each time it gets sold, repacked with other addresses and sold again, the better the chance that a Spammer will get it.
Another method is robotic address harvesters. These are programs that scan web pages looking for email addresses. Many BB and other postings show email addresses (TSN doesn't). If you post to Krazy Quilters to talk about your latest fabric find, and have your email listed, these guys will harvest it.
If your great Aunt likes to send out mass mailings about the latest cake recepie, and doesn't use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy), your address gets sent out to everybody on the list. Then someone on that list fowards it, and eventually someone less than honest can harvest all those addresses.
And the last one is simply automatic email generation programs. They just generate sequences of letters and numbers, and slap on a network provider (aol.com, att.net, earthlink, etc.). My wife has a few email addresses, and one she uses ONLY with one other friend, who is very savvy, and never uses it with others. Yet she started getting spammed within a couple of weeks of setting it up. That's just an automatic generation program. They can do it because email is free.
So tell your wife that it's not your fault - blame Al Gore, he invented the Internet. OK, maybe not. Let her read this posting, and the others. Spam is a fact of Internet life right now, and you can be whistle-clean and get spam for everything from discount male growth enhancers to porn websites. The most important thing to do it NOT TO RESPOND. Some may include instructions to get off the mail list - DON'T BELIEVE THEM. The most valueable thing on the Internet is a known good email address. Those are bought and sold. If you respond, then they know it's a known good address, and you'll get a hundred times more mail from your new friends. Horror of horrors, they won't honor that 'remove from mailing list'.
posted by 192.249....
, Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:49:08, Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:02:17 <-- Viewing This Message
, Thu, 24 Feb 2005 19:48:32, Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:24:06
, Fri, 25 Feb 2005 04:36:11
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