Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 20:26:21 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: Barry Newton <bnewton at ashcomp.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Spam Observation
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

A while back, I was complaining about a sudden jump in the amount of spam I
received--it's gotten to about 2500 a day, and growing.  Couldn't
understand why; just started using more filtering in Eudora and speed
reading subjects and senders.

Made the breakthrough discovery tonight:  almost none of those emails were
addressed to "bnewton."  They were almost all made-up names at my
domain.  What was killing me was the switch I've had set for years, to
forward all undeliverable mail to the account administrator (me).  This was
once a useful feature, because it allowed me to create any number of
fictitious email id's without having to create actual mailboxes for
them.  Unfortunately, that "feature" has had to be turned off.

I am now hypothesizing that some purveyor of mailing lists has found it
easier to generate listings rather than harvest them--a new low in screwing
the customer.  In a way, this is delicious.  Just glad the fix turned out
to be so easy.

Barry