den: (bugger)
den ([personal profile] den) wrote2003-09-02 05:25 pm

Unbelievable

I'm in the process of moving to a new ISP. This account hasn't existed until now, was never advertised, and uses my full name as a username so it is 13 letters long. The account was activated at 4.30pm, and when I checked the email just now there was a pr0n spam there.

un-fucking-believable.

[identity profile] devslashblog.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 01:47 am (UTC)(link)
ozemail by any chance?

[identity profile] dewhitton.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 01:56 am (UTC)(link)
Optus. I'm moving from ozemail

[identity profile] zibblsnrt.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 08:01 am (UTC)(link)
These days spammers aren't even aiming at specific addresses very often, as much as they are firing spam at (random combination of letters and numbers)@(your ISP) in the hopes of hitting something. I've gotten spams where the headers were aiming at things like aaaaaaaaaa@[site], aaaaaaaaab@[site], aaaaaaaaac@[site], etc, in the hopes of finding a match. My email address begins with a Z.

This is going on perpetually. Bounces are sometimes filtered out, and sometimes they aren't in the hopes of someone taking up an address in the future.

And that's why spam is currently sucking down an unbelievable eighty percent of the internet's entire bandwidth and CPU pools.

[identity profile] dewhitton.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 04:31 pm (UTC)(link)
I work on the black hole theory. All spam that comes in is dumped to trash by Spam Assassin, with no bounce or acknowledgement. Getting it once is bad enough, but bouncing it back is doubling the problem so I just suck it up.

[identity profile] javarod.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 08:05 am (UTC)(link)
Heh, this reminds me of a few years back when I registered a business. Registered a delivery service at about 1.30PM. 10AM or so the next day, I get a call from a guy offering to sell me credit card processing services. Lets see, the company is adevertised in any way shape or form, and Tachyon Delivery Service is not likely to be something you're going to randomly stumble upon, so just where did they get it from? And I might note that that was the only telemarketer call I ever got with that business.

(Anonymous) 2003-09-02 03:49 pm (UTC)(link)
At least in Canada, the Credit Bureau sells addresses to 'appropriate' mailing lists and other advertisers. One of the little things they'd like you to not know. Banks also do this sort of thing. And people wonder why I long for Communism. Yes, that's half joking.

-Rust

[identity profile] javarod.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 04:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I suspect that's the case, but then again, only one telemarketer? What he was selling would be useful to any delivery service, and yet, he was the only one to call. How odd...
But, I don't have any issue with them selling some of my info, like my mailing address and company name, that's fine, if I don't want the ad, I'll round file it. On the other hand, phone calls in most cases will disrupt your business, which isn't fair.

[identity profile] tiado-ab.livejournal.com 2003-09-02 08:05 am (UTC)(link)
Wow. Optus' list of subscribers must have been compromised, and the spammer proceeded to spam everybody on the list. Either that, or the spammer randomly generated the e-mail addresses, and yours happened to be one of the ones it generated.

If the spam appears to get worse, Spamcop has a free eporting service you can sign up for (http://spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml).