From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
...
Now I will grant that it's possible that the guy who sent email from
Russia through a server in Italy in order to spam me in the United
States actually *did* have a Hotmail account at the time the first
message was sent. I don't know why he would have bothered, but it's
possible.
Can you explain why you think that person would have set up an
account just so that it could get shut down immediately? And why you
think this matters?
I've repeatedly pointed out reasons why that is not just possible but
quite likely. Contrary to spammer fighter religious dogma, many
(but certainly not all) spammers care very much about receiving
"bounces" and "removes." Many spammers honestly think that letting
their targets opt-out is the right thing to do. That's why you often
seen pleas in spam that you not ask ISPs to cancel "remove" drop-boxes.
Other spammers know that their target lists tend to fill with garbage
as addresses are abandoned and as target address harvesting mechanisms
get confused (e.g. by message-IDs). They know that some major ISPs
by rumor including AOL automatically blacklist STMP clients by IP
address after too many bad target addresses. This provides a strong
incentive for spammers to clean their target lists. To do that, they
need drop-boxes get delivery failure notifications.
Why do you think Yahoo or Hotmail (I've forgotten which) has deployed
mechanisms to prevent robots from creating free drop boxes? Who do
you think might needs to create so many free drop boxes that they'd
use software?
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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