On Sunday, August 24, 2003, 9:02:26 AM, Cyberspace Publishing commented: CP> Why keep a non-productive address in his list or sell it to some CP> other spammer knowing that the same thing is going to happen to CP> the buyer and that they may get bad references from the buyer for CP> selling them lists of 'dead' addresses?
They don't care, Tom. If they did care, I wouldn't be getting a bunch of nondeliverable email addressed to fake names. Example: I'm seeing a bunch of user unknown bounces from my system for spam email addressed to VzWcwKrdl@ and .Ux.A.jV@ Does any spammer really believe that there really is a user named .Ux.A.jV? Why are there so many of these bounces? Why have these persisted over time? Don't the spammers figure out that when an email addressed to "VzWcwKrdl" comes back user unknown, it probably is a bad address? Again, they don't care. They are more interested in how much money they can get from selling X number of names than in whether those names are active or whether anyone is actually reading them. >> >>I'd be curious as to what that fallacy was. :) CP> What really should go there is the actual address one wants to CP> appear as an "Unknown User" - MailWasher is smart enough already CP> to add "MAILER-DAEMON" as the part before the '@' sign and domain CP> name. Doing it the way I said was saying that "MAILER-DAEMON" was CP> the "Unknown User"!!! Only by doing some test bounces to myself CP> from my servers and from MailWasher with the same address did I CP> discover what was actually happening! Thanks for making me dig CP> a little deeper. Now if you could help be word a very embarassing CP> apology, I'd be eternally grateful! :) Tom, you don't have to apologize, but it does illustrate my point. Obviously, your incorrectly configured Mailwasher message didn't look like a real bounce to a spammer -- so at the very least, the Mailwasher bounce needs some tweaking. Where I found that Mailwasher (the beta) was deficient was that I get email from many addresses that are aliased back to me. For example [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] - etc. What I would see is that Mailwasher would bounce back a message associated with the POP box that I retrieved email from, which was not what the spammer had. So for example, spammer has picked up an alias that I used on posting to usenet - for example, cutename@ mydomain.com. That address has been configured to forward to my real address at sbcglobal.net, where I pick it up. Bounce message goes back NOT with the "cutename" configuration, but GIVING the spammer the REAL sbcglobal.net address that they never had in the first place. An honest spammer can do nothing at all with that info - they run the name against their list and find out that they don't have the name, so the "cutename" stays on. A devious, dishonest spammer has now picked up a NEW name, much WORSE for them to have. (Under the above scheme, I've used "cutename" only in conjuction with my posts to the one usenet group, and I can easily disable the name; but getting rid of my primary sbcglobal.net log in is much more inconvenient). Maybe the PRO version has solved this issue, but at least with the beta, the bounce configuration was obviously counter productive. -Abigail ____ � The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM � ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
