On Fri 6 August 2004 13:01, Wayne Topa wrote: > David P James(dpjames@rogers.com) is reported to have said: > > On Thu 5 August 2004 21:45, Paul Johnson wrote: > > > The AOL art file trick is a fairly common mailing list spam bait > > > tactic. Good thing you didn't reply directly... > > > > Do we actually know that for sure? url? I've only seen this on the > > debian-user mailing list and no other. > > I have never heard of an AOL customer using Linux, have you? No I haven't, which is why if you check the archives of this list for previous instances of this kind of thing you'll find that I've poured cold water on them. > > I see people asking questions about Red Hat, Mandrake, etc and think > it's strange on a Debian user list, but AOL (MickeySoft) questions > are really questionable. I treat all AOL questions as spam, but > thats just the way I feel about it. YMMV Well they are AOL users after all, so who knows what they were thinking. It just seems like an odd kind of spam bait tactic, since, well, for starters it requires a legit aol.com email address in order to harvest the reply emails. Since one can only get an aol.com email address by becoming an AOL subscriber this would unnecessarily increase the risk of getting caught as compared to using a Hotmail or Yahoo! address, etc. The headers also indicate they're using AOL, which is highly unusual for spammers since the From:, Return-Path: and Received: headers all point to the same place (AOL) whereas in spam practice these are usually different. So in the absence of evidence (eg a url that describes this kind of thing) to the contrary, I'm inclined to believe these are in fact requests from misguided AOL users who happened upon the mailing list address via a search of some sort (since we get them often enough it becomes a self-replicating problem). In practice, these things are 'spam' to us but we don't know that the senders are indeed professional spammers. All the evidence we have suggests the opposite. -- David P James Ottawa, Ontario http://david.jamesnet.ca ICQ: #42891899, Jabber: davidpjames@jabber.org Noone isn't no one
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