[OT] Spambaiting

[PvK]

Funny. Keeping free spambait accounts is an amusing idea to fight back.

Much spam seems to be just a dummy shot to detect whether there is anyone listening at an address. A lot of the spam "market" is in selling lists of supposedly real email addresses, so most of the spam is probably just research to see if anyone is there.

Their next step is to then dupe other obnoxious or clueless businessfolks into buying their lists, programs, or services to spam these lists of valid addresses.

The resulting spam traffic though often isn't actually trying to sell the target anything, and frequently the reply-to address is totally bogus and/or will hit some innocent sysop's In box. Some of the email is so offensive or incoherent that I expect that's a pretty good sign it's just a ping to see if an "unknown address" response comes back from the mail server or not.

PvK