On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 12:32:01PM +0000, Kirk D Bailey wrote: > If it is offered as a list of people who REFUSE o purchaqse in > response to spam, yea they would, such persons are a total waste of > time. Why bother emailing them at all?
Because it takes some amount of effort for the spammers to clean up their list. Why should they bother? If they are spammers who sell CDs of people's addresses or offer to spam for others, each address they remove means one less address they can sell. There is a direct disincentive to clean their list. The fact that the address is spam-hostile, or even may exist at all is completely insignificant. If they are spammers who spam directly, they usually do it via abusing an open relay, and with a forged From_ address. Why should they even spend a second to clean their list? They'll never see any bounces from the bogus addresses, and they already know they are going to lose their disposable account for spamming. It's easier to spam 10,000 addresses and not care that 1,000 are going to complain and another 1,000 are bad addresses than it is to clean the list and spam the 7,998 who just-hit-delete. Granted, there are other spammers, with other methods of spamming than these two examples, but these are two of the larger groups. The address "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" was invented as a spam trap and used to post to Usenet around 4 years ago. After a few months, it was delted. So it has not existed for years, and it STILL gets spammed every single day. If spammers aren't even going to stop spamming addresses that return a No-Such-User, there is no hope for a remove list. David -- David Shaw | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/ +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson
