Mark Horn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Last April I wrote an email to tmda-workers which described a
> technique that GMANE could use to provide a TMDA confirmed email
> forwarding system.

Gmane ended up adopting something very similar. See
http://gmane.org/tmda.php

> What do you think the probability is that spammers are monitoring
> the TMDA (and other antispam) lists in order to get ideas on how to
> circumvent the techniques?

I don't have any idea, but it would seem like smart business to me.
I'd certainly do this if I was on "the dark side".

> What's interesting to me is that I never use my
> "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" account.  I don't think I've used it once,
> ever.  This may, in fact, be the first email that it's ever been
> used in.

This isn't the first time I've heard of this happening. My stepfather
started receiving spam at his Earthlink account before he had sent his
first e-mail with it. There's a leak somewhere it appears. We'll give
them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't selling out their
subscribers.

> I guess this is one thing that I really like about TMDA.  Spammers
> can know everything TMDA does, but they're still going to have a
> really hard time figuring out how to circumvent it.

TMDA is very simple to circumvent by another human being, but not by
bulk-mailers which is where the real problem is.

Setting up some sort of auto-responder to defeat TMDA is next to
impossible even if it was worth the effort. A program which could
heuristically determine a likely address on each recipient's
whitelist, and then forge the spam from that address would have some
success. But, who is going undergo that much pain and expense to get a
message through that you're only going to immediately delete? At that
point, it's no longer bulk-mailing.
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