Re: SPAM WARNING: spammers use Debian lists for harvesting

[P Kirk <patrick@enterprise-hr.com>]

Hi all,

Its my impression that there are only a few email harvesters out there
and that they don't work very hard.  Perhaps once you have a list with a
million names, its not worth wasting time building a new one.

For example, I found about the time of Clinton/Lewinski I was getting a
very well put together set of commentaries from a chap called Kristol.
Turns out he's a TV commentator who had bought the spam list.  Now for
the first time I could see proper headers because he didn't do any of
the usual munging stuff.  He had over 500 addresses with kirk in them
and was sending his stuff out in alphabetical blocks.  I create a
.forward rule that automatically drove all mail to that alias into a
spam file.  

That was over 3 years ago.  Since then I have used pknews all over
usenet and patrick in quite a few mailing lists.  Yet over half the 20
or so pieces of spam I get every day are to that old pkirk address which
hasn't been used publicly in 3 years.

Another example: its rare to get spam in the work inbox yet that address
has been blasted out on every PR release for over a year.  I think
spammers aim to get aol users or msn users in the hope that they are
less cynical.

I quite enjoy tinkering with my .forward to catch the poor devils.  Once
you get to the stage where only 1 or 2 gets through each week without
blocking people you know, its almost a hobby.

Perhaps I need to get out more :-(

Patrick