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Re: Warning: spammer targeting this list

2004-04-08 11:18:53
On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 09:05:45 -0700, Professional Software Engineering wrote:

At 14:22 2004-04-08 +0100, Lars Hecking wrote:
 The interesting and relevant detail: nearly all of these emails are
 targeting non-existent local addresses. Further analysis shows that
 the target addresses are obviously message-id headers harvested from
 postings I made to this list 1997-2002.

Yea, the tosser spammers who can't even be bothered to parse the correct 
field for addresses.  Really peeves me.  I've seen this going on for well 
over a year (perhaps even two), though I've never bothered to try to peg 
down where the messageids originated.

I've seen E-mails coming to nonexistent addresses that are exact copies of 
UseNet posts ID's like 
484674ca(_dot_)0404080853(_dot_)5f30cc8(_at_)posting(_dot_)google(_dot_)com
We get hundreds of those in any 24 hours period.

The same applies to address harvesters sending mail to randomly generated 
user names.

I am running a script that searches through mail logs and parses canonical 
names of machines persistently sending mail to non-existent addresses and 
E-mails me the summaries.  The next day I block access from  those nodes.
However, I would not recommend to automate this process, as at least 50% of 
such sources are mail servers of major ISP's, which cannot be blocked for 
obvious reasons.


Frank Bures, Dept. of Chemistry, University of Toronto, M5S 3H6
fbures(_at_)chem(_dot_)toronto(_dot_)edu
http://www.chem.utoronto.ca/general/itelec.html
PGP public key: 
http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=index&search=Frank+Bures


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