Sam, there is a whole cottage industry out there to collect email addresses thru screen scraping and other methods, then sell a CD with about a million verified addresses to the spammers. If a message is accepted by the smtp server and delivered to you it is verified, even if it ends up in your junk folder. I use hMailServer on my hosting service and it allows me to block a single ip number or a range. This will then look to the spammer like it is not a valid email address anymore and eventually (hopefully?) disappear from their list. If I see blocks of four (typical) ip numbers in a neighborhood I look at the domain registration, doesn't take a genius to spot the spammers, I then block the whole C subnet if there are no valid domains in it. BTW, in the process of analyzing all the spam I found that there are some BIG service providers that seem to sell hosting to spammers knowingly (it's money). If you contact their abuse with concrete examples they will respond with "We have an anti-spam policy". Surprisingly most of them are in the US; if you are interested I can extract and send you this list.
Walter -----Original Message----- From: Sam Densler Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2012 5:32 PM To: liveaboard@liveaboardonline.com Subject: Re: [Liveaboard] A Hey (OH OH! Norm Hacked!) Ben, It makes sense when there is a legitimate product offered for sale in the spam email but what about the emails that just have a link with no text, or a bunch of nonsense, or I have even seen some with no link at all. Just seems like the intent is to piss people off but what is the financial gain? Sam _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list Liveaboard@liveaboardonline.com To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to liveaboard-j...@liveaboardonline.com To unsubscribe send an email to liveaboard-le...@liveaboardonline.com The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/liveaboard@liveaboardnow.org The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
