[CS-FSLUG] Dumb spam

[Nathan T.]

On 8/11/05, Tim Young <Tim.Young at lightsys.org> wrote:
> Sorry to break the news.
> 
> Often that sort of spam is a test.  With intelligent spam catchers these
> days, they do a lot of tests to see what sorts of things gets through
> the various spam catchers.  Also, it does things like telling the
> spammers if your account is active.  For example, if I were to send an
> email to fred at nodomain.org, I would get something back that says,
> Fred at nodomain.org, user unknown.  Then if I were to send your email
> account a stray mail message, it would not say "user unknown."
> 
> So what you are seeing is a form of random polling.  Most of them do not
> automatically check in, but some of them have embedded URLs that they
> can track when the email is opened.  But most of those are now caught
> with spam-catchers.

The interesting thing about that is that KMail had a feature to bounce
mail with a fake message (including the spoofed address of
admin at someisp.com) and when I used to use that the spam only got
worse. Ignoring messages has kept me spam free for the most part, just
because messages don't bounce doesn't mean that someone will actually
read e-mails sent to a given address.