>>It may be spammers refining their listing to reduce the cost
>>and time of sending to bad addresses, or meta-spammers
>>collecting addresses to sell >to spammers.
>
>But this just doesn't make sense to me. They can do this
>refining by sending an actual spam ad. They will still get the
>same bounce errors that they can trap to test for results, and
>they will still get the same people emailing back complaining
>to stop.
>
>So why waste a good open relay on a spam "test" when the spam
>itself can act as a test.
One possible reason is to test whether an address is a good one
without tripping an *ISP's* spam filter. Send a message full
of legitimate, un-filter-able words through a "legitimate" path
to test the address... then send the spam to that address
through an open relay and hope to dodge the spam filters.
Roger
