When I started with my domains I enabled an option to forward all mail to one mailbox. In time a lot of unknown names with the extension @ frysianfools .com slipped trough.

So at this moment I get some spam for peggy, sue, brendan etc etc.
I never had any legal emails trough them (thanx to monitoring with MWP I can sat that out loud).

Should I give the already spam catchers a mailbox, set them up as spam-sink and send them to my spam portal address?

Ofcourse I will notify Spamforce about it so you can loop it

Hi GG

Please excuse me for inadvertently missing this post. It's been a little manic of-late

Spammers tend to munge-cycle all sorts of names in the header fields, and although they do not necessarily bear a relationship to the Email addresses on their hit-lists, it IS certainly quite possible (and even probable).

It would certainly be an interesting experiment to see if that is the case here, though naturally equally as-possible that those names are in-fact real and in use. The only way to find out is by attempting to raise Email addresses against them, and therefore you would be informed if they are already registered in someone else's name.

Hello Ike

It kinda seems the original point was missed. I am in the same boat...

I had published email addys for a list of clients but they were simply put online so people could write those clients but while those names were published they had a purpose, but now those email addys have no legit use and will never get legit mail. As a result right now those email addys are already forwarding the mail to the blackhole. Each of them (60-70) email addys are well established in the spammer's databases so they would get traffic immediately without waiting for a new email addy to get discovered.

So even though they were existing email addys, they had no real purpose before therefore are all available vs. creating new ones.

How else do you "seed" the spammer's databases? By inserting a new email address somewhere in the site for a future spider visit by the spammers?

Hello Vividere.

Thank you for your post.

There are a variety of ways to seed addresses, one common example being to "Unsubscribe" to spam by entering your spam-sink address in the box provided.

However, I had considered this and extended the possibilities for just such Email addresses that had been de-commissioned and therefore introduced portal extension codes. Please see http://www.spamforce.com/about.html which details this further in the examples given.

Hopefully this answers your enquiry - particularly if the Email addresses have been long-decommissioned. Experience would suggest that the majority of these will continue to be targetted for years to come


Brendan.

Believe me, you don't have to recycle stuff that's already getting spam. If you own the domain, just make up some new addresses and start forwarding them to SpamForce. I have a page on my website that lists the spamsink addresses in the source code with a warning not to mail to them on pain of being reported as a spammer. The spammers of course extracted the email addresses within a few weeks and the flood gates are now open.

I don't know where Brendan seeded the email addresses, because they get much nastier spam than my other addresses. I don't go to that kind of website

I have a 10 year old domain that gets a spam every 10 seconds. I have a catch all address sending everything to a Gmail account where they get auto-moved to trash and hence auto deleted after 30 days. The account is usually full (about 2.7GB - 250,000 spams). This sounds like a useful respository for identifying current trends in spam. Would anyone like to take over from gmail as the lucky recipient? Would this help Spamforce?

I kept a couple of addresses separate but routed the bulk to gmail so I could rescue any I might need - but obviously that's impractical.