Just started to get a trickle of SPAM to my unique STW forum address. It’s noteworthy only in that I receive virtually no Spam usually.

Thing is this address has been used in both STW ver1.0 and STW ver2.0, but another address I also used in STW ver1.0 hasn’t started receiving spam…

So is it the spammers havent started using all the email addresses hoiked from the old forum in the hack OR is there a bot farming addresses from the forum member’s page (the only other place this address is published) in the current incarnation of the forum?

How spammers get their addresses is a mystery to me. I abide by all the classic rules of where and when not to publish an email address, but I issue unique addresses at my domain to each individual online entitiy (say STW, or The Times, or a hope) so I can monitor any Spam. On two occasions now two unique addresses have received spam. The addresses ONLY get typed into the entity’s website or used for direct emailing. Both times the entity (reputable companies) claim that their databases havent been compromised and that the address must have been farmed en route as it passed some server out there in the ether. Is that likely/feasible?

How spammers get their addresses is a mystery to me

I imagine they have some sort of program that simply generates random addresses until they get it right. I had a credit card copied like this, just pot luck in that case though.

Personally I’ve got one email address and I don’t care who mails me. AOL has a good spam filter, and I only reply to stuff I recognise. Easy.
🙂

I’ve noticed the opposite.

Levels of received spam have reduced on the address I use for STW since the change of forums.

I have a number of Tiscali accounts and their spam filters are stopping all but one or two spam emails a week. The general level of spam to all my accounts appears to have reduced since early December 08. I used to get about 100 spams a day it’s now down to less than that a week.

100 a day??? I reckon about 5 a day get through the Virgin Media spam filters.

Same as Pete, I long since stopped worrying about spam, just goes straight in the bin before reaching my inbox.
Of course that completely fails to answer your question though 🙂

Your address is on your profile page, so they can just skim the addresses from there.

Like PeterPoddy, I have one email address that I’ve been using everywhere for years. There are currently 393 spam email in my gmail spam folder (i.e. spam recieved in the last 30 days), but I only see maybe one a fortnight in my inbox.

The amount of spam I get has fallen loads since that spam server in the States was taken out a couple of months ago, when it used to sit at about 700.

Hmm – 1,659 spam messages to my gmail account (which is used very rarely). But there’s also link on the spam folder page to a spam fajitas recipe, so it’s not all bad 😀