Jaap wrote: > Andy, you (like many others) seem to very much > overrate the intelligence in the spamming industry: > Why worry much about spamming the wrong people? Some spammers out there apparently do test to see if their mail is received and/or read. I get a few spam mails every week with Read Receipt (Disposition-Notification) enabled, which sends a mail back to the sender saying that I read their bloody message.
> When you have a response of 1 in 1000, you don't > spam a 1000 people, but you spam a million people > and you still have 1000 idiots responding and > buying your stuff. If 90% of those million addresses bounce, it can seriously impact your network lines. > Spammers do not keep track of what their spammings > do and magically extract privacy data from it. > They buy new addresses for every spam. There is no > use in sending the same spam to the same people over > and over again. Perhaps, but they do it anyway. I get the same spam over and over again. You don't? There are two kinds of spam. There's the stuff that's truly junk: Nigerian scams, porn, free halucinogens. Then there's commercial e-mail by real businesses who don't realize that you and I don't appreciate their ads in our mail. I get a lot of junk postal mail too, and at least 99% of it is real, legit, but unwanted. Some of those same people are just taking their ads to the Internet. > What you should try is to get on the don't-want-to > be-spammed lists. The more responsible spam address > providers keep such lists and subtract those addresses > from the list of all new harvested listings But what about the less responsible spam address providers who don't? Do you know how much mail I get that claims it isn't spam because I "signed up" to receive their junk e-mail? Bullshit. No, they send me mail because they bought my address from someone who harvested it. A lot of the spam I get nowadays, is sent to an address I haven't used in years. But in the 1990's, I used that address to contribute to a few maillists (like this one!), and now those messages are archived and anyone can access them and harvest addresses like mine from them. Some things it helps to be paranoid about. I've always been told not to reply to spam and ask them to stop. It just lets them know you exist, so they can pass your address on to a dozen other spammers. Andy -- Author: Ingraham, Andrew INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
