Re: Spammers got our address from [MacPerl]

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

Andy Armstrong <andy@wonderworks.co.uk> writes:
>I've just received a UCE from the owners of
>
>   http://www.majon.com

Sigh. Yes, I know.

>I did a search and found that (according to
>altavista) at least 900 sites have already received this award,

Only 900? Seems like I greatly overestimated the rate at which suckers were
born on the WWW.

>The UCE had the title
>
>   [MacPerl] Congratulations !!!
>
>which leads me to assume that our URL has probably been scavenged from
>this list (probably, ironically, using a Perl script if they have any
>sense...).

Your analysis fails to take into account that their mail doesn't even mention
the URL that got the award.

What happened was simply that they scavenged the WWW, grabbed all mailto: URLs
and spammed to them. There are a number of mailto:mac-perl@iis.ee.ethz.ch URLs
around, so they (inadvertently, though that hardly exonerates them) sent one of
their mails (I got 3 copies so far) to the MacPerl mailing list.

I'm sorry that this happened. There isn't much that I can do about it. Please
don't aggravate the problem of mailing list spam by further *discussing*
mailing list spam on this list (If any litigation lawyers underemployed due to
the recent cigarette settlement would like to try their hand at a spam class
action lawsuit, I'll let you know :-)

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
  "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'."
                                            -- Jack Cohen


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