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« Universal Truth #124 |
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January 21, 2004
JUNK MAIL
As some of you may know, my grandmother (my dad's mom) passed away a few years ago. Recently, my parents realized that she still had some frequent flyer miles left for an airline, so they decided to redeem them for magazine subscriptions for me. A thoughtful idea, although my parents failed to inform me of it ahead of time, and I did call them in a panic one night, informing them that I was getting magazines addressed to her. After getting over the fear of identity theft, I started to enjoy the array of magazines that my parents chose for me.
Recently, though, I've started to get junk mail addressed to her. Some of it related to magazines, others promising 0% APR for the next 6 months. It's fairly disturbing to get junk mail addressed to your dead grandmother, but more so, it's annoying and is the surest sign that companies sell their customer data.
Because of this, I started thinking about e-mail spam, a topic near and dear to my heart. By the time my Stanford e-mail address expired, I was getting round about 40 spam e-mails a day. I'm curious how I actually got all that spam, so I'm doing an experiment. I signed up for 3 new hotmail addresses, and I'm going to try 3 different ways to get them spammed.
1) sha_sha_new@hotmail.com: This address I'm just going to post on my webpage a whole bunch of times and see if spambots pick it up. Those of you with webpages can help me out with this if you want.
2) sha_sha_new_2@thesameserver: I'm going to use this address to post to random newsgroups.
3) sha_sha_new_3@thesameserver: I'll use this one to register on a whole bunch of webpages.
I'll keep you all updated if any of the 3 get any spam. Maybe I'll get none, in which case ISPs and webpages are doing something right. Maybe I'll forget about it, and never speak of it again. Or maybe, just maybe, I'm a big ol' nerd for doing this.
sha_sha_new@hotmail.com
Maybe.
[Edit: Doing a Google search for "frequent flyer" (a lazy way for me to spell-check) returns "CatholiCity: Discover the Catholic Church" as the third result. Weird.]
[05:54 PM]
+++++
One thing that people who have control over their own mailserver often do is set up email "masks" such that they get all mail addressed to (for example) andy-(.*)@aurikan.org, where .* is a regular expression matching some random sequence of characters, delivered to their main mail box.
Then, when they register at a website, for example, slashdot, they set their email for registration purposes to andy-slashdot@aurikan.org.
Thus when naughty companies share your contact details, the spammers start sending herbal viagra ads to andy-slashdot@aurikan.org and I immediately who was the source that violated my privacy by sharing details. Furthermore, if I'm not too attached to the email address I can permanently bitbucket all email sent to the alias.
Some day I will probably follow the scheme. For now, I don't get enough spam to bother, and Moz. Thunderbird does a great job of flagging it for me, making it brutally easy to delete.
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