Where Is Spam When You Want It? 580
Sean writes "In a complete twist to what everybody else is trying to do these days, I need to attract spam to an e-mail address for a research survey I am conducting. I have submitted a few articles to a handful of Usenet groups, and I have signed up to some general mailing lists but so far I have nothing to show for it. How come by personal account gets 100+ spam each day yet when I try to find it I get nothing? Where should I post my address so that it attracts spam?"
Hotmail. (Score:5, Informative)
usenet isnt that great (Score:2, Informative)
Domain registry (Score:5, Informative)
FREE pr0n (Score:1, Informative)
works every time.
Ebay (Score:5, Informative)
You'll quickly become inundated with "How-tos" to Ebay, "official" emails from Ubid by people attempting to fraudulently gain access to your personal information, more tips-and-tricks, more offers from uBid, and of course a plethora of marvelous online drugstore advertisements.
Enjoy.
use online greeting card companies (Score:5, Informative)
'Unsubscribe' (Score:4, Informative)
Take the urls (DO NOT CLICK ON THEM) and strip them of the stuff after the '?'
Go to each of those 'unsibscribe' pages and put the test account in the email to be removed box.
Its the best way to get spam. The spammers will generally use it as confirmation that your address does indeed exist, and theyll happily put you in their alive list, where you are shure to get everything they are selling.
http://www.spamarchive.org/ (Score:5, Informative)
Spamarchive (Score:2, Informative)
What's worked for me... (Score:2, Informative)
Based on a friend's suggestion, I created an alternate e-mail address and used it to create user IDs on classmates.com [classmates.com] and match.com [match.com] and, sure enough, until I kill the ID months later, I was getting 30+ spams a day after my ISP was done with its own filtering. I wasn't being very scientific and I don't know if it was one or the other or both, but it's a place to start...
A few thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
- If on a popular e-mail provider such as AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo, put up a profile and go to a chat room.
- Allow your e-mail address to be listed on any of the directories.
- Put your e-mail on a Geocities website.
It's easy. (Score:5, Informative)
steve
Lots of Contests (Score:2, Informative)
Some links of the sweet, sweet google:
Here [sweepstakes-contests.com]
Again [about.com]
And Again [acuwin.com]
If you search for 'contests' and click on the sponsored link then you should have an abundant source. Also, if you sign up for a few of those "Free" trials at porno websites, you should start to get some serious spam.
Try Free For All Links style sites.. (Score:3, Informative)
Hey I got plenty!
Posting in public forums (Score:3, Informative)
Post to Google Groups [google.com] on many well-frequented lists (don't cross-post!) with the address. Sign up for a Slashdot account and write generally informative (+5! +5! +5!) tripe with your real email address tied to it.
You also should've specified the test email in your story submission (i.e. Sean [mailto] writes:) -- too late for that now, of course. In the slashdot@myname.endjunk.com emails I've provided, I've easily gotten 10+/day within a few hours of first posting. Neat.
Look at my email addy... (Score:4, Informative)
I used it to attract spam so that I could train spamassassin for my use and for a few friends and family.
I went and dropped it all over usenet in the pr0n groups, went to every viagra site I could find, clicked on every banner add I saw.
It took a few weeks but I finally got the desired results. You'll have to put up with some extremely offensive email for awhile so make sure the wife and kids can't get to it during this phase.
After doing this for a few weeks I was getting 50+ spams a day. Now that I have spamassassin all tuned up I just don't check mail on that account. Once I feel that I no longer have the need to tweak SA, I'll just dump the account..
Too bad this doesn't work for TV commercials...
HEY! How about an app that, er, nevermind...
Re:Ebay (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ebay (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Outlook... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Outlook... (Score:3, Informative)
How about a dictionary lookup (Score:2, Informative)
wait longer? (Score:2, Informative)
The best way to get spam? Put your email address into a popular HOWTO, or run a 3-letter domain (a friend of mine gets about 2/second to his three-letter domain). And be patient.
But if you want some of mine, I'm happy to get rid of it. ;)
Re:Yahoo Games (Score:2, Informative)
just use mailinator.com for throw away email.
Re:Change your thesis - Decode the encryption. (Score:3, Informative)
Send one of those e-greeting cards (Score:3, Informative)
My Spam corpus (Score:4, Informative)
I may have used it for a few web sites, but the only one I recall is a local political organization which I doubt would have sold, or had the expertise to sell, its list. Still, the data is tainted, and I can't say it all comes from usenet.
According to DejaGoogle, I last used it 18 April 2002, and it was last referenced in a follow-up message 5 May 2002. I first used it 15 February 2002.
For a while I had my ISP forward mail to that address to "nothing" until I worried it might be piling up on the server somewhere (I don't know what forwarding to "nothing" means in the ISP's web control panel). So there are no messages for most of the month of May 2003.
Disregarding the emails from the political organization, there are 1733 emails; the earliest is dated 16 July 2002, the lastest today 21 Sep 2003. (There are probably earlier emails to this address which have been archived.)
So that's a span of 432 days, not subtracting the period when I wasn't having the email forwarded. Again not subtracting the un-forwarded days, that's ~4 per day.
Note that this is only spam to this particular "sacrificial" address; it does not count the large amount of spam that, thanks to having some idiots as "friends", hits my "real" address.
I have not been subject to any dictionary attacks on my domain name, but I have gotten about 105 spams to admin@mydomain in the same time period. This pushes the daily average to ~4.25/day.
Since I started getting a lot of spam, I've made a practice of assigning each commerical contact or mailing list a different address (theirdomain.tld@mydomain.tld generally); surprisingly, these get very little spam, despite getting large volumes of legitimate mail each day.
Wait. (Score:5, Informative)
Send yourself a Free!! E-Greeting!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Then start clicking on the Unsubscribe links.
Re:worked for me (Score:3, Informative)
http://xult.org/email.html [xult.org]
Surprisingly few spams have arrived. I suppose the page isn't that high traffic.... yet
SpamCop's list of websites == Game Over (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=inprogress&ty
That's Spamcop's list of spam-vertised web sites. All of those sites have submission forms; just put the email address in there and you'll be rockin' and rollin' within a few hours. I got into a 'spam war' with one of my roommates back in college, and with that Spamcop list I was able to render his email account COMPLETELY useless within a couple of hours (If you're reading this, sorry 'bout that Brian... )
Speaking of spam, on a random side note, I've recently started checking all of my email accounts with Shadango.com. Anybody else tried that yet? Shadango allows you to have advanced filtering applied to ALL of your existing accounts (both POP and IMAP). It's frickin' great. So now I don't get any more spam, plus I can check all 5 of my email accounts from one place. They've also got file storage, a calendar, etc. It's money. Check it out.
-Nate
Re:Murphy's Law part2... (Score:3, Informative)
- Positive expectations yield negative results.
- Negative expectations yield negative results.
A special case of this is the demo effect: The best way to make your pride-and-joy crash on the first keypress is to invite your boss's boss in to watch it run.Likewise, the only way to attract spam is by trying to avoid it.
Re:http://www.spamarchive.org/ (Score:3, Informative)
free shadango account? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hotmail. (Score:2, Informative)
It's been a couple of years, and their EULA has probably changed two
dozen times ad interim, but when I actually read Microsoft's privacy
policy, it essentially said, in heavy verbiage, "we will sell your
address to whomever will pay for it". By heavy verbiage, I mean
something of the form, "may share said contact information with
select business partners in order to provide value-added services"
or some such rot. If your eyes glaze over at the first hint of
weaselese, you wouldn't catch it, but it seemed pretty clear to me
that they were saying they would sell my address. Maybe I'm just
paranoid, though. After all, Microsoft is a very reputable company,
as everyone here knows, and so maybe I'm just not giving them enough
benefit of the doubt in my poor understanding of EULA verbiage.
Some solutions (Score:3, Informative)
2. spamarchive.org [spamarchive.org]
3. Build a Spam Honeypot [google.com]
hth
pete
BlueCat Networks....masters at combatting SPAM (Score:2, Informative)
BlueCat Networks www.bluecatnetworks.com have this really cool product called Meridius. It's an anti-SPAM Mail Relay appliance. Typically sits in the DMZ. Why don't you contact them and ask them about SPAM?
click on it... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outlook... (Score:2, Informative)
You're exactly right - you aren't responsible for others' actions. In this case, you'd be liable for your irresponsible action.
Yes, that's exactly right. This is what's known as an attractive nuisance [nolo.com]
Re:Outlook... (Score:3, Informative)
There is an easy defence against this:
That works just fine, but it gets even easier:
Own your own domain.
Have your e-mail setup to forward *@yourdomain.com to your actual e-mail address.
Never give anyone your e-mail address. Give everybody different e-mail addresses to e-mail you at. Your friend jenny can e-mail you at jenny@yourdomain or whatever she'd like.
When you sign up for something, use an e-mail address like theirproduct@yourdomain or theirdomain.com@yourdomain.
Then you always know who's sending you what e-mail, and if one of the aliases gets bogged down with spam, flag it, bounce it, do as you will.
I bought my domain for $30 for 2 years, including the mail service (I don't have the resources to set up my own mail server). It works great and I don't get any spam.
Re:Outlook... (Score:2, Informative)
Einstein didn't think so. He was a major influence in the creation of the nuclear bomb, and he did take responsibility for it, calling it the greatest mistake of his life.
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml#fi
Got Spam? (Score:4, Informative)
Much harder than it seems. A spam trap address can take months or even years to get up to the same levels of spam as other addresses.
Some techniques;
Unsubscribe the address.
Apart from proving that some spammers actually do harvest from unsubscribes, this method isn't very effective, because some spammers actually do remove you from their lists.
(of course, if you only unsubscribe addresses that don't get any spam, it can't get worse.)
Dictionary attacks. If you run a mail server, you will occasionally be attacked. Either pick easy to guess names, or accept any name that fits a rule. It's a good idea to always reject the first name (unless it's already in your lists) since some spammers start with a 'test' name.
Also, there will be plenty of names tried, so there's no need to accept a suspiciously high percentage. Choose a simple rule that rejects a fair percentage of the names.
For example, accept any name which has a '5b' as the last hex character when hashed.
If your server has any extra delays after a bad name, remove them.
Buy expired domains.
Some of my best trap addresses are from previously owned domains.
Posting to usenet.
I've not had much luck with this.
Posting to mailing lists.
This also seems fairly hit or miss.
Posting to websites.
Works eventually, but it can take a long time.
Setting them in Ineternet Explorer.
Some web sites have javascript that can grab your email address from your browser.
(bonus points if you write this up in a proposal)
When you get spam...
Read the web pages. Once you actually get spam, either read it in a browser, or download all the links with wget. Some spammers are paying attention, in particular it seems, the ones who sell addresses to other spammers.
Respond. When you get one of those weird messages like "Are you the same noc-staff I went to school with?" Respond with a simple "sorry, wrong guy."
-- this is not a