spam/avoidance of

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Thu Jan 31 10:39:44 2002

>Feldman, Robert wrote:

> Also, how does one enforce a no-call list internationally? A lot of the spam
> I get on Hotmail comes from non-US sources. BTW, I started getting spam on
> Hotmail _before_ I had sent out any email -- just signed up for it and the
> spam started coming the next day. And their filtering works for only 80%-90%
> of the spam, as about 10% gets delivered to my inbox.
> Bob

Jerome Fine replies:

I sounds as if the spam is sent to a list of reasonable e-mail addresses picked
by a computer program without any actual verification - unless Hotmail "sells"
them - but how would the new list be circulated so quickly?

It seems as if a permanent e-mail address will not be possible until the spam
problem is handled by the users themselves.

I just suggested adding 4 random characters (36 ** 4 = 1,679,616) to my
actual e-mail name (before the _at_) and changing them as needed - BUT
with a fallback of replacing the 4 random characters with the current year.
Has anyone ever tried this? Obviously, if it became a standard practice,
it would not work, but there must be many such replacement methods.
And in the mean time, e-mail addresses would start to change so often
than perhaps the ISPs would finally find so much spam mail was being
rejected that they would actually attempt to stop unsolicited traffic.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 10:39:44 GMT