[Air-l] Porn spam ...

[jeremy hunsinger]

I haven't noticed much in terms of porn based spam, I used to get some a 
few months ago, but I started routing them to autorepliers and they 
stopped.  What I have been getting is more "nigerian scam" types and 
strange advertisements from south america and china, for instance i just 
received an offer for bottled water in argentina, very strange. There 
was an article on this a few weeks back on wired news about the increase 
in spam.  I believe it tied it to the increase in search engines 
worldwide and the ease of harvesting e-mails, etc.  along those lines, 
I'm seeing many more search engines hitting the servers here.

one thing that seems to affect increases in spam is belonging to e-mail 
lists that archive but don't remove your e-mail.  Air-l and all similar 
that i run replace the e-mail, though not in forwarded messages:( not 
much i can do about that without rewriting the archivers.

however, an interesting test for such harvesting is to do a google 
search on your e-mail id, for instance jhuns generates 404 google 
records.  I ran some other frequent posters and generalize that most 
people that post to lists generate numbers over 100.

jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
on the ibook
www.cddc.vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy
www.dromocracy.com