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?"
Why not (Score:5, Insightful)
Free porn sites? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personal experience?
Re:Hotmail. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're best bet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Outlook... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam heaven is right at your doorstep! (Score:3, Insightful)
TROLL-MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If you want to be scientific, don't (Score:2, Insightful)
But, it all depends on the precise of your study (you should have been more precise when asking here). Here is some possibility of studies and how you should act
1- Which actions get you the most spam : create many new email accounts. Paste slashdot@... here, suscribe to pr0n with pervert@, post to Usenet with usenet@,
2- What spam do specific people gets : get the spam real people got for the last n days. A university teacher shouldn't have the same spam as a child or as
3- What constitute spam : just do anything you want. Try everything you think of to increase spam, you need quantity, not quality.
For real spam... (Score:3, Insightful)
Use a control group (Score:4, Insightful)
Address 1 - (Control Address) Post No Where and read no messages until the testing time is over
Address 2 - Post On Usenet (Deja.com)
Address 3 - Post In Public ICQ program
Address 4 - Porn Sites
Address 5 - IRC
etc
Re:Outlook... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Outlook... (Score:4, Insightful)
Very true.
It is not illegal to set out a machine to be compromised.
Perhaps not criminally illegal, but I believe the owner could certainly be held liable for damages. Imagine if a virus writer put a destructive virus on a stack of floppies and left them precariously around a public computer lab. When the program on one of those disks gets run by some curious person, don't you feel that the virus writer is at least somewhat liable, even though he didn't "pull the trigger"?
Why isn't Microsoft responsible? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ebay (Score:3, Insightful)
Ebay specifically discourages this because lots of people have had their passwords to ebay stolen by people sending them fake email pretending to be from ebay and asking for their password for "security purposes".
graspee
Re:Outlook... (Score:3, Insightful)
Shadango.com, fo sheezy.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I always just used my Yahoo account to get spam when I signed up for stuff online. BUT, just today I found out that Shadango allows you to generate temporary, 'disposable' email accounts. See, you generate a random email account, sign up for whatever online (using that new account), and all the crap goes to the temporary account, which you can delete/change at will.
It has definitely helped to cut down on the amount of spam I get. Kevin Hanson recommends it highly.
-Kevin
Re:Outlook... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Outlook... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gun's are designed to kill. Computers are not designed for cracking/spaming/etc. If you leave a chain saw out in your back yard, knowing that the kid down the block is (1) a bit whacked, (2) could be a potential danger, and (3) should not be on your property, are you partially responcible for when he kills some one with that chain saw? Now, what if it is the kid on the next block that could be the danger? Or the next city, county state of country? At what point is it no longer reasonable to expect that the public to know something is a threat?
It used to be enough to run a virus scanner every so often. Now you have to start by patching your systems regularly, then move on to running regularly updated virus scanners, installing and updating firewalls for the network, scanning for spyware, installing and updating desktop firewalls, updating spam filters, chasing drivers, updating applications (add more from the endless list here), all to keep a system going. So I ask again, at what point is it no longer reasonable to expect that the public will know something is or could be a threat?
And at what point does the public feel that it is no longer reasonable to expect them to know something is or could be a threat when it comes to that "harmless little box on the desk"?
Re:Outlook... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Change your thesis - Decode the encryption. (Score:3, Insightful)
It wouldn't stop any spam filter I have seen.
Ah well, probably some ISP out there has such a silly filter.
I was envisioning something smarter along the lines of hidden fields (have a look at ye average web form , a lot of them have hidden fields to hold state and tracking info).
For example as I type this, let me look at the "Page Source". Ooo lookee, on slashdot itself....
I'm thinking along the lines of...
ie. Workout the encoding for the hidden fields and tweak them to freak out any automated processing software the spammers use.
A similar idea is to feed carefully crafted cookies to web servers to crack them.
For example, I would guess that the spammers spam each newsgroup / discussion list with a slightly different URL, the URL goes exactly the same place but records which spam campaign produced the best results.
Now tweak that URL in crafty ways and you may DoS their server.
I didn't see anybody post this method... (Score:2, Insightful)
The best (worse?) way to get spammed is to fill out online survey. You know those free online IQ tests with the inflated scores (I scored 182 and I have problems doing my taxes ;))? If you use your real email address you will feel very dumb about a week later when your mailbox fills up with "Get a collAge degree at home!!" mails. ;)
Also start sending those cute greeting card emails to yourself. Most of those are just collectors for emails.
I think they stopped cruising USENET for emails. To few people use their actual emails there anymore...
Re:Outlook... (Score:4, Insightful)
It'll take time (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure your now addresses have been harvested by a number of systems already. You'll have to wait, though for a client to buy a list, or another wave of mailings to go out before one is sent to you.
Re:Outlook... (Score:5, Insightful)
More or less yes. The major difference is that with a honeypot you make sure that there's only a way in -- you make it impossible for the offender to use the honeypot to carry on attacks from the honeypot. And that does not seem to be the case in this example.
How to attract spam (Score:2, Insightful)
"Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Unsolicited Email Six-month Report" [cdt.org]
"The Great CNET Spam-off" [cnet.com]