Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 02:37:16PM -0700, Steve Atkins wrote:
Also any actual usage of an email address leads to it being in a mailbox
on a Windows machine. That, in turn, leads to it being sprayed all over
the internet by viruses, and hence harvested by spammers.
I have lots of uniquely created addresses that were provably not guessed
that get a lot of spam via that route.
Precisely correct, and worth emphasizing. I've gone so far as to
deliberately embed non-guessable addresses in the headers of single
messages sent to single recipients -- and have subsequently received spam
at some of them. And of course addresses used repeatedly with multiple
recipients tend to attract spam much quicker, since such usage increases
the probability that the addresses will show up on a compromised system.
And are you sure their machines were actually infected? I
experienced spam after sending to organizations that should be
secured, e.g. nic.es. As I wrote a few minutes ago, I recognized the
connection by timely receiving spam in the relevant foreign
language. My guess is that spammers have also other means to sniff
mail traffic.
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