I have noticed that most of the spam comes not from the email address
I have plastered all over my website, but from and address I use for
filling in web forms on the net when you give you email address to
download a piece of software or to activate it.
SOMEBODY is selling lists to spammers.

Signature
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.
Andrew Thompson - 22 Oct 2005 10:51 GMT
..
> SOMEBODY is selling lists to spammers.
I am absolutely unastounded. Determining who is doing it
is the first problem though.
Perhaps you should use a series of addresses and only use
one for every half dozen progams you download - that would
help narrow it down.
BTW - what is the specific connection with Java?
Roedy Green - 22 Oct 2005 11:00 GMT
>BTW - what is the specific connection with Java?
People who use Java download stuff all the time in return for their
email addresses. They are my friends. I warn my friends of hazards.

Signature
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.
Andrew Thompson - 22 Oct 2005 11:15 GMT
>>BTW - what is the specific connection with Java?
>
> People who use Java download stuff all the time in return for their
> email addresses. They are my friends. I warn my friends of hazards.
Aha! Thanks for clarifying.
Wibble - 22 Oct 2005 12:33 GMT
>>> BTW - what is the specific connection with Java?
>>
>> People who use Java download stuff all the time in return for their
>> email addresses. They are my friends. I warn my friends of hazards.
>
> Aha! Thanks for clarifying.
Unless you actually want to receive regular mail from
the guys with the web forms, check out
http://mailinator.com
They provide free, anonymous, short lived email accounts.
Great for RespondToEmail form validations.
Alan Krueger - 22 Oct 2005 15:57 GMT
> Unless you actually want to receive regular mail from
> the guys with the web forms, check out
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> They provide free, anonymous, short lived email accounts.
> Great for RespondToEmail form validations.
There's also sneakemail.com, they do likewise.
Alan Krueger - 22 Oct 2005 16:04 GMT
> I have noticed that most of the spam comes not from the email address
> I have plastered all over my website, but from and address I use for
> filling in web forms on the net when you give you email address to
> download a piece of software or to activate it.
>
> SOMEBODY is selling lists to spammers.
Sometimes this may be due to desktop email-borne worms that use local
harvested email addresses not only for delivery but for obfuscating the
sender. By this process, private correspondent email addresses can be
leaked onto the Internet.
More likely are the companies that sell their list of customers to
"affiliates" for advertising who either turn out to be spammers or the
ones that sell them to spammers.
This is one of the reasons to hand out tagged email addresses. For
instance with sendmail-based mail servers and others (including Gmail,
apparently), you can use an address like this:
localpart+tag@example.com
that will deliver to
localpart@example.com
and allow you to see where the address came from. For instance, if you
end up getting spam from localpart+amazon.com@example.com, and you only
gave that address to amazon.com, you know where the leak occurred.
Similar things can be done with sneakemail or mailinator with unique,
obuscated local addresses that are easy to track back to the source and
difficult to convert into an untagged address.