On 29 Jan 2005 at 10:37, Aaron Sherber wrote: > At 10:24 AM 01/29/2005, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > >leads me to the speculate a bit. When you set up an email account, > your >ID is placed in some table. Now if a person, not necessarily > associated >with your ISP knows the address of that table, and how to > access it's >contents, it would be trivial to read the table on a > routine basis, and >find out the new user names, and determine which > are no longer in the table. > > I'm not sure how this is done technically, but I know for a fact that > there is a certain amount of spam delivered by a method similar to > this. > > For a couple of years, mail for sherber.com was handled by > Everyone.net. At the beginning of January, I switched all hosting to a > new hosting service. Even today, when there are presumably no MX > records anywhere on the Internet linking sherber.com to Everyone.net, > I am still receiving a trickle of spam in the box at Everyone.net (the > account is still active there). The only way this could happen is if > someone accesses the SMTP server at Everyone.net and gets a list of > all accounts on the server (or marks a message for delivery to all > existing accounts, or some such thing).
Eh? If the account existed and was on spammers' lists before you shut down the Everyone.net hosting, then it's just leftover and coming through just because the account is still active (or you have crazily set up a catch-all, which is useless in the age of spam, in my opinion). If you shut down the Everyone.net host entirely, the spammers would still be sending to those email addresses, they just wouldn't go anywhere. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
