Bullwinkle wrote:
> "I see so many forwarded email and multiple recipients with lines and
> lines of peoples email addresses in the forwarded text. Many times I
> don't know most of the people in that list. If I were one who wanted
> to send junk mail this would be a wonderful source of valid email
> addresses.
....one calming thing.
Email addresses in quantities of less than about 100,000 have
no economic value.
There is a lot of hysteria going around about having your
email address published, or having the email subscription lists
for autox.team.net pilfered and used for spam.
It is SLIGHTLY true that targeted email might take
advantage of a list like this, that isn't the main problem. Nobody
likes spam, but getting a "wanna buy my old MG" message isn't
going to really send anyone into convulsions of rage.
The truly annoying spams are the blanket emails we all
get too many of, the Herbal Viagras, the Unsecured Loans
ones, and so on.
Companies that buy mailing lists for these spams do
so by the millions or tens of millions. Conversely,
the companies that collect email addresses to sell
to spammers want them by the millions, or tens of
millions.
So in a nutshell, they aren't going to go through
all of the work to scan mail archives, or do
"whos" to majordomo to get 500-ish email addresses. Their
techniques are a lot more brute force and a lot less
intelligent, but give them the kind of volume
they want. (Usenet scanning, trawling web pages
looking for email addresses, doing "get info"
on ten million successive ICQ addresses, etc)
So, if you get an email that has about 10 people
in the "To:" list, the odds that somebody reading
the email will save the email addresses somewhere
and use them for spam.... well... almost zero
really.
--
Trevor Boicey, P. Eng.
Ottawa, Canada, tboicey@brit.ca
ICQ #17432933 http://www.brit.ca/~tboicey/
"You can't crush cars with a university degree."
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