To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 22:51:16 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Nigerian Letters
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:44:24 -0800 (PST) Ivy Yap <yapivy at techemail.com>
writes:
> Wow, all this talk of spam and letters from Nigeria.  I think I've
> gotten less than 10 spam messages since I started using e-mail.  I
> feel unloved! ;)  And where's all the porn spam that people keep
> complaining about?  How come I never get any?  :D
>

I started using email in the summer of 1998, and I got no spam for about
two years.  Now I get maybe 20 per day - not a big problem, since that's
only about 20% of the total messages I get.  I get very few Nigerian scam
spams, maybe one per month; most of the spam I get is mortgage, loan,
credit card and credit repair offers, offers concerning penis or breast
enlargement, various money making schemes vaguely described, and ads for
apparently pornographic web sites, the ads almost invariably containing
photos of women with large breasts.  I get practically no spam in
languages other than English, which is perhaps somewhat puzzling since
many Americans have reported getting a lot of Korean spam.  I spend more
time checking and deleting legitimate messages which are of little or no
interest to me than I do deleting spam.  I'm subscribed to a number of
Libertarian email lists where there is a lot of cross posting.

Spammers obtain email addresses by buying CDs which can have as many as
tens of millions of addresses per CD.  But the ultimate source of the
address lists is chiefly by means of robots crawling the web and
newsgroup archives harvesting strings in the format * at *.* .  Otherwise,
addresses might have been copied by unscrupulous employees who have
access to massive address data bases, and sold to spammers for maybe a
dollar per thousand, or even less.  As Keith Lynch has pointed out, one
could publish one's email address on the front page of the New York
Times, and that would be unlikely to result in spammers getting the
address.

I have never posted to newsgroups, so I have long assumed that my address
somehow got into spammers' hands as a result of me having provided it
when registering software or filling out rebate forms or otherwise
signing up for stuff at websites, since I did not think that my address
had been posted anywhere on the web.  However today I found that a google
search on my email address turns up 124 hits, so it seems my address is
on the web.

Ron Kean

.

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