Andy Hiller wrote:
>I'm on the British car list and Vintage Racing list, and I'm getting
>more and more e-mail from Get-Rich-Quick sites, MLMers, porn sites,
>E-mail list marketers, Etc.
I don't think these lists are the source of your problem. I'm on the
vintage-race and a few others, but I do not get spam at the address
these lists know about.
There are several ways your email address could be picked up by a
spammer.
Do you ever post ANYTHING to ANY Usenet newsgroup? That right there
usually gets me a few weeks of spam each time I do it. As pointed out,
you can put something simple like NOSPAM in the middle of your return
address to defeat the simple minded spambots most spammers use. I
should point out tho, that most ISPs consider even this benign use of a
false return address a violation of their Terms & Conditions.
Do you have a web page? There are spambots that "mine" ISP servers for
lists of addresses that appear on web pages. Even if you don't have a
web page, some ISPs make their account lists avaliable to search engines
for the well-intentioned purpose of letting old friends find each other.
These can also be "mined" by spammers. If you suspect this, by all
means report it to your own ISP. If you see a To: or Cc: list with an
alphabetical group of email addresses from your ISP, bingo. Your ISP
has been mined.
If you do your own search on the topic NOSPAM, you should find more info
on defeating and reporting spam, including how to trace the real source.
|