[TriLUG] NC spam laws?

Jeremy Portzer jeremyp at pobox.com
Mon May 5 14:10:25 EDT 2003


On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 13:58, Bradford Powell wrote:

> 
> My idea is slightly different. Somewhere on your site, place a page or
> portion of a page that would not ordinarily be visible to someone reading
> it (perhaps text same color as background, with text something like:
> 
> 	The following address: 3jkjsa at mindspring.com
> 	is not a real address, and you shouldn't send email to it.
> 
> Then, whenever you get email at that address, you have a strong indicator
> that it is spam and you can seed your "certain to be spam" file or spam
> blacklist or whatever.
> 
> Probably not a unique idea, but I have not seen mention of it elsewhere.
> 


Actually, this methodology is quite common in the spam-fighting
developer community.  I'm on the spamassassin-talk mailing list, and
they regularly discuss ways such as this to maintain a spam "corpus" for
testing spamassassin rules.

Another interesting application of the method you describe was used in
this study conducted by the "Center for Democracy and Technology":
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml .  (I think this
report was mentioned here in March when it came out; I'm not sure.)

They made a bunch of email addresses, kept track of which e-mail
addresses they used in which location (web sites, Usenet newsgroups,
mailing list email, etc) and complied statistics on which attracted the
most spam.  As you may have guessed, putting email addresses on the web
was the easiest way to get spam

Regards,
Jeremy

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