October 24, 2003
Spam stats
This is troubling: Spam has e-mail by the throat
Do your part to help cut down on spam. Do not give out your e-mail address when you sign up for things. Always request you NOT be contacted for anything. They'll abuse this. Or, if you have to give them something, give them a throw-away address. If you run your own mail server then it'd be trivial to add special addresses that can be tracked. For example, the ABC Company needs a contact address, I'd make one up called billabc@mydomain. Then anytime I got mail to the billabc account I'd know how they got the address.
And for heaven's sake, do NOT reply to requests to unsubscribe! As the study shows this is ignored 63% of the time. Not to mention it's an old trick used to actually confirm that your address exists! After all, if they get a reply from you it means you got their mail. This is all they're after. When they're sure your address works they can turn around and sell it to yet another spammer.
Hopefully a 'do not spam list' will be intelligently done. Either by using a hash of addresses (not md5 or sha1) or by salting the downloads with special trapping addresses. As in, give a publisher a list of addresses but sprinkle in a few special ones. Ones that are unique to the download. So if anything ever sends mail to that address it'll be instantly known who leaked it. Punish them criminally for it.
