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Old 11-11-2005, 20:38   #6
patrickp
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Re: NTL: email addresses obtained by spammers?

Quote:
Originally Posted by nedsram
BTW my email address is of the form joe.bloggs23 at ntlworld.com (heavily munged). Another interesting thing - which I also noticed at Tesco - was that only my primary email address gets the spam. None of the secondary ones I created receive any of it. (Yes, I've turned off the spam filter for all of them.) Which tends to support the theory that somebody has obtained a list of primary email addresses I'm afraid - especially as some of the seconday email addresses would be much easier to generate randomly than mine.

Brian

Has it occurred to you that there may well be a real joe.bloggs23 with ntl, Brian? If you're going to post even imaginary addresses in a forum, it's wise either to present them in a form that they're not readable as valid email addresses, or to ensure that they are not existing addresses or for existing domains - even if the address doesn't exist, the domain's servers will still get the mail and have to deal with it.

Certainly, it's true that spammers are unlikely to be trawling a forum like this, but it's not impossible, and it's also a very bad habit to get into.

And, incidentally, the format of email address you've presented _is_ likely to be duplicated by spammers' address generators. Do you think they don't know that ISPs usually discriminate between customers with the same name by adding a number after the name? You'll have to be a little more subtle than that.
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