Genealogy Chat

I accept the explanation of how they find our address, what I want to know is why they keep sending rubbish. What do they gain from it? I only get about 6-8 a day, offering me Viagra, or a penis enlargement or something similar, some just blank with no message at all - why? Do people actually reply to these messages and buy things from them? Jan

Thanks Judy. I'll look into yahoo. Take care. Neil

nudge

Judys reply is spot on. I work in the IT industry on email systems and it's exactly as she describes. Try searching for your email address in google ! It can be quite enlightening , also look in the Groups tab on google too. Spider programs scoure the internet for addresses, as well as using the address guessing techinques described. There are lots of methods to reduce it. A good simple approach is to filter mail not addressed explicitly to you i.e To: not equal (!=) [email protected]. Some spam is still sent to large lists , so your address may not appear in the header. Most mail clients support filters (Netscape, Outlook Express) so you might consider moving mail NOT addressed to you into a different folder. Of course if you DO belong to mailing lists then you will have to create a specific filter for these that kicks in earlier than the catch all spam rule. It's very hard to write definitive rules. I use a mail client that lets me colour code mail based on the likelihood of being spam. The odd legitimate mail gets falsely colour coded, but it does catch most and sppeds up which mails I look at and which I ignore.

How does a spammer get my e-mail address? There are several ways spammers can obtain your e-mail address by obtaining it directly or indirectly, from you! A spammer will commonly sell or trade lists of e-mail addresses so once an e-mail address is on one list, it may be merged with others and might be nearly impossible to remove. To reduce spam, control your e-mail address and how it is used. Here are the most common ways spammers obtain your e-mail addresses from you: They have obtained your e-mail address from one of your posts to a newsgroup, other bulletin board or chat room. Spammers use software programs, often referred to as "spidering" programs, to search for e-mail addresses on these public forums. Similarly, spammers have software that scans Web sites for e-mail addresses. If you have a personal web page, or administrate a web site, any e-mail addresses on those pages may be located and added to e-mail lists. You reply to spam or unwanted e-mails, asking to be removed by clicking a fake "reply to unsubscribe" link. Often when you do this, you are confirming that your e-mail address is valid and is being monitored. This is something a spammer wants in an e-mail address. This can result in even MORE spam. This practice still continues, despite the passage of a federal anti-spam law called The Can Spam Act, that went into effect January 1, 2004, requiring a functioning "opt out" link or a legitimate "reply to unsubscribe" e-mail address. You've signed up for "free" or pay services on the Internet without checking the service?s privacy policy and terms of use and your e-mail address was added to a mailing list. Filling out Web site forms, surveys, etc., also can get your e-mail address added to a list. You've intentionally signed up for a mailing list without checking their policies. Hopefully this will result in receiving only the e-mails you want and not spam. Someone else has signed you up to a mailing list and/or provided your e-mail address to a company because you didn't let them know that you want to keep your e-mail address private. Spammers can also obtain your e-mail address without your help, simply by guessing it. Surprisingly, this is a common process, and can be quite effective. Here's how they do it: A spammer may start with a list of valid e-mail addresses, then extract the user name portion of the e-mail address, (everything before the @ sign) and try to use it with different providers, e.g., [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc. This is a hit-or-miss approach to growing their existing mailing list that is often very successful. Spammers also use software programs to generate random user names from common names and words in the dictionary. Again, once they generate their list of user name, they just add a popular domain name to the end.

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