> >Over the past week or so I've had a huge increase in the amount of junk mail > >that I get. The ration of junk to genuine is now about 30:1. > > > >Has anyone else noticed an increase? Mine has coincided with a subscription > >to MacCentral. Although none of the junk relates in any way to Mac products, > >I have now unsubscribed from MacCentral to see if that makes a difference. > > The nature of spammers is typically that once they've got your e-mail > address they'll continue to spam you even if you unsubscribe from the > original service from which your e-mail address was harvested.
I have also noted an increase in the number of spam messages making it through to my mailbox, although I noticed it happened around early to mid last week, rather than as a result of subscription to more email lists. I've also noted that my work email has started being spammed as well, something that only started around 2 months ago in small quantites, and about 2 weeks ago in generous quantites - I had suspected the installation of the RealPlayer was the cause of this, due to it being around that time of installation, and as the subscription address always appears from the same server, so it's come from one list. I had a discussion with another friend on Friday (who is also an iiNet subscriber) who had noticed the same issue - perhaps iiNet have dropped some of their filtering around this time as someone else eluded to? Of course we also theorized that a spammer with a little knowledge could simply write a program that would go through all the possible variations of usernames and domain names with minimal effort - I wait for the day when it is made illegal and spammers can be prosecuted as they waste far too much of our valuable time, money and download bandwidth. Richard