Someone has harvested my address

dan at geer.org dan at geer.org
Sun Sep 7 14:35:27 CEST 2008


Phil Reynolds writes:
-+-------------------
 | I kept this email address specifically for use for my postings on, and
 | to help me sort postings from, this list.
 | 
 | It seems that somebody has harvested this address, as I received an
 | off-list spam to it.
 | 
 | Is anyone responsible for the administration of this list interested in
 | details, or shall I just change this address?
 | 

I do not run this list, but I do run others, some
of which are quite small.  The quite small ones
often have no list-directed spam at all as the list
names would not be guessable.  When a previously
spam-free list starts getting list-directed spam
it has been correlated with adding someone to the
list or having a list member cc a list-directed
message to other parties.

If you (any "you") wanted to track down the vector,
I'd start with list additions immediately preceding
the appearance of the spam.

In like manner, whenever I buy anything on the web
or do anything where, for better or worse, an e-mail
address is essential to completing the transaction,
I use the firm's name at a domain I own for no other
purpose, e.g., paintstore at trashdomain.com.  That may
be approximately what you are doing as well.  Honestly,
no commercial firm has lost my effectively use-once
addresses and the domain I use for this purpose has
only a whitelist filter for things like "paintstore"
that I've actually used.  As such, I'm tempted to
conclude that e-mail address harvesting tends to be
dominated by certified pre-0wned home users.

Ruminating,

--dan




More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list