"Everyone" tells me they have a hotmail account and get loads of spam to it.
They always tell me that they didn't give the email address out to anyone, yet they get upwards of 20 spams a day to the account. They complain about how the junk filters don't work, and how when they go away it won't receive their legitimate email due to inbox size restrictions.
All my efforts at empirically testing this have so far failed. Even when I opt-in to the hotmail white pages. I just get no spam. The account sits there receiving nothing.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there really no mole inside hotmail selling email addresses? Or have these peoplebeen duped into selecting multiple "subscription" services without their knowing?... Inquiring minds want to know.
Hotmail spam
Odud on 2002-09-17T16:42:55
I get about one spam message every two weeks - they appear to be advertising various German pron sites. Like you I've heard lots of people saying it's unusable because of the spam. But I know at least six other people who use it as their main e-mail without too mnay problems.
it's all a matter of who you know.
wickline on 2002-09-17T18:06:53
I found myself typing something I seem to re-type frequently, so I stuck it
in my journal for future handy reference.
If you never use your address, but you tell even one person what it is, then you may get spam. You don't have to tell
Sanford Wallace to meet this doom. You can tell your dearest friend who would never ever ever want you to get spammed.
Just tell them once, and your address could spoiled.
-matt
That's all I use it for!
VSarkiss on 2002-09-17T19:05:59
I have a hotmail address that I only use for things like online orders, registering at web sites, and so on. I have a different address at pobox.com that I use for "real" correspondence. Every few days I login to the hotmail account and delete about a dozen spam emails. I figure it got put on spam lists by online merchants, but I don't care.
Now if I can only figure out how my pobox.com address ended up on Korean spam lists.... (I don't even know what they're trying to sell me. Maybe I should find the Hangul symbol for "Viagra".)
Guessable email addresses
IlyaM on 2002-09-17T19:43:01
The question is how your email address on hotmail looks. I don't know if still works but when I checked last time it was possible to test if certaint email address exists on hotmail servers using SMTP commands MAIL and RCPT (BTW this technique is implemented in my module
Mail::CheckUser). After RCPT hotmail servers answers if recipient exists or not. So I guess it is quite trivial for spammers to find all valid "simple" email addresses using a dictionary. I would expect email address like matt@hotmail.com to recieve tons of spam but email address like q432f6gr@hostmail.com is unlikely to recieve it unless this address is published somewhere.
Re:Guessable email addresses
rafael on 2002-09-17T19:48:42
On the other hand, if you use an address like q432f6gr@hostmail.com, you may have some difficulties to reach your correspondents that have installed spam filters.
