Hotmail spamming

[ssmith88]

i'm alway send hotmail spam reports to Spamcop.

why is Hotmail a favorite fake address for spammers?

also, by sending spam reports to Spamcop, am I confirming my email address to spammers?

cheers

[stan_qaz]

Does hotmail end up on the list of addresses reports are being sent to? I see a lot of e-mail with hotmail addresses that turn out to be forged and spamcop doesn't send the hotmail folks a report.

Hotmail was a common address and many folks added it to their spam filters and they used to be more open to letting spammers send spam than they are today.

You have three reporting options in spamcop, mole (no reports go to the spammer's hosts) munged (your address is concealed but other tracking may be left intact) and normal where your address is sent.

Normally the reports are not sent to the spammers, they are sent to the company hosting the spammer, to the people with servers forwarding the spam or to ISP folks that have cootie infested Windows boxes sending spam. Some of the hosts/admins will pass the spam reports along to the spammer but most do not.

You have to decide if passing your address back to the spammer is good or bad. First off the spammer already has your address, without it they couldn't send you mail. Second if the spammer gets a report with your address there are two options, remove your name from his lists - quit getting reported - be able to send more spam with less work or do something to harass you using your address. Harassing you takes some level of work on the spammers part and makes them no money so that is unlikely.

Me, I pass it along! I want my spam to stop and the only way to do that is get the spammers to drop my address. Using MW to zap spam before your e-mail program gets cracked and reporting to spamcop are the two best things you can do to stop your spam.

[ssmith88]

yes. I currently do report spam to Spamcops with same settings as you do.

It would be great if we could spam the spammer by bouncing his rubbish back to him. But that doesn't work.
In my country, Australia, it has the worlds most severe anti-spam laws. I hope my ISP catches spammer with huge fine.

[stan_qaz]

I'm seeing great things coming from Australia, especially about disconnecting cootie infested Windows boxes from the net before they can start attacking other machines or spewing spam.

About anything is better than US law that basically made spamming legal as long as your spam has a real address and an unsubscribe link. Funny that they made the spammers include a working link but don't make them remove your name when you use it.

Spam could have been cut way back with domain keys, spf and the like but Microsoft did everything they could do to block them from being used and pushed a Microsoft patented process instead so they could turn a profit off every spam blocked.

[ssmith88]

I made mistake of giving my private email to an adult site. Usually i only gave my Yahoo email so they can dump spam.
now I'm paying for my sins of endless spam

Do adult sites sell emails to spammers? Or maybe they are the spammers

[stan_qaz]

Some adult sites sell not only your e-mail but real address and credit card info. They make little on memberships but do pretty well sending info out the back door, same with drug sites and other not so reputable types. Some that look legit will either sell your info or let it leak through poor security so it is always best to use a card with good fraud protection and a dedicated shopping address that you can easily dump and replace.

I'm not allowed to visit adult sites :-) so I can't suggest safe ones but someone must have written something up you could find with Google suggesting ones that are reputable and/or ones that are risky.