TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate

Re: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate

Robert Bonomi (bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com)
Sun, 21 Nov 2004 14:14:52 +0000

In article <telecom23.559.11@telecom-digest.org>, Dan Lanciani
<ddl@danlan.com> wrote:

> Obviously. But why should I care? The point of the response is to
> tell people who were neither sending spam nor forging their address
> that their mail has been incorrectly identified as spam. Note that I
> do not include the body of the original message in my automated
> response, so you can't use my filter to reflect spam to a third party.

Suppose *your* email address got forged as the sender on spam that
went to 100,000 people using a similar system.

Guess what happens to _your_ mailbox.

But, "why should those people care?" *You* don't care about being
part of doing it to them.

If all the spam had *invalid* addresses addresses, it wouldn't be an
issue. But, it is _very_ common for the forged address to belong to a
_real_person_ who had *nothing*to*do* with the spam.

You *are* spamming _their_ mailbox.

>> Occasionally I see messages like that and they are treated
>> like spam, since they have nothing to do with me and responding to
>> them is useless. They go to /dev/null. Until it's full.

> That works only if you have time to look at all the messages. I
> don't.

>> Since spammers never use a real From: address replying by mail is
>> useless.

> It is extremely useful for my purposes; it just may not happen to also
> do what you (said you) want. :)

Yeah. you mail-bomb *innocent* parties who's address was used
_without_their_permission_as the sender.

> My machine doesn't look like a relay and they are not trying to use it
> as a relay. They are sending to long lists of (invalid) *local*
> addresses.

It's called a 'dictionary' attack. Just one more way of trying to
find 'valid' email addresses.

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