FC: "My Short Life As An Unintentional Porn Spammer" by Mike Masnick

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Mike says in the article: "One potential solution to this would be to 
require every outgoing email to have a verified identifier of some sort, so 
that any email can automatically be traced back to the original sender."

-Declan

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Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 09:56:33 -0800
To: declan () well com
From: Mike Masnick <mike () techdirt com>
Subject: My Short Life As An Unintentional Porn Spammer

Hi Declan,

Not sure if this would be interesting to folks on the Politech list, but 
since the issue of spam comes up fairly often, and this is a different sort 
of spam attack that people are increasingly facing, I figured I'd pass it 
along.  It's a piece I wrote after being "slammed" by a porn spammer who 
put my email as the reply-to in a series of porn spams - meaning that I can 
now answer the questions "who replies to spam?" and (should anyone ever 
wonder) "what are the hundreds of variations on bounced messages?".

-Mike

http://www.techdirt.com/fotr/20030211/0230225_F.shtml

My Short Life As An Unintentional Spammer
by Mike Masnick

Ever wonder what sorts of emails end up in a spammer's email database? Want 
to know who actually responds to spam and what they say? Want to know the 
myriads of formats (and languages) a bounced email message can take? I can 
now tell you all of this. Without my knowledge, I recently became an 
accidental porn spammer.

When I got home one evening a few weeks ago, I noticed that I had more than 
the expected amount of email waiting for me. A quick glance through the 
inbox showed about fifty "bounced" emails - saying that email addresses of 
people I had emailed did not exist. The problem with this, of course, was 
that I hadn't actually emailed anyone.




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