From: Jonathan Berry (jberry_at_islandnet.com)
Date: Fri May 03 2002 - 17:24:22 EDT
Maybe my friend was just lucky on yahoo.ca.
She used both addresses only for mail, not for lists or usenet.
I believe that the spammers get addresses from hotmail (etc) by
querying account setup of an obvious name (say johnsmith_at_...
plus its variants johnsmith47_at_... etc), and each time they get
an "account not available" message, they add that to their list
of addresses to be spammed.
When we tried to set up her yahoo account, we tried literally
over a dozen unlikely words (and word-name-combos) and every
one of them was taken! Finally, we tried a word she remembered
from her native language, and it worked. However, later we
discovered that we had misspelled the word! It doesn't exist
in any language. So maybe that is why she is still spam-free
at yahoo.
Or maybe yahoo just makes the process more difficult for the
spammers. Her hotmail address wasn't exactly obvious either.
Of course, if you have used your address for other than
personal email, that alone would explain the receipt of spam.
For example, a yahoo address appears in the message below,
which is archived at Zurich and is therefore available to
spammers at practically no effort. That isn't the one you're
talking about, is it?
In article <20020429204605.88077.qmail_at_web9705.mail.yahoo.com>,
"Steve C." <stevec50_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>Actually I seem to get about as much SPAM on either
>one. They both have some protection but it's not
>really effective. Hotmail lets me block messages from
>individual addresses but that's full so now I'm
>blocking whole domains. However, since the SPAMMERS
>generate a different phony originating address each
>time, that is not very effective either. Yahoo has a
>feature to send all Bulk mail to the trash but I can't
>block it from specific domains. If both had both
>features I could get rid of a lot of it.
>
>--- Jonathan Berry <jberry_at_islandnet.com> wrote:
>> And yahoo accounts seem less likely to receive spam
>> than
>> hotmail accounts do. IMHE. YMMV. IANAS.
>
>
-- cheers Jonathan Berry http://www.islandnet.com/~jberry/ to know more than you want
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