Re: Spam sent to contact address

[Matt Thorne <mlthorne@xxxxxxxxx>]

perhaps that email address was added the Not so Good Email addr's
List, for whichever spammer, and they used that list to run testing
for whichever Bot they are designing.

On 1/18/06, Tor User <toruser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 1/18/06, Arrakistor <arrakistor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hello Tor User,
> >
> > If there are html references to remote files inside, this would be a way
> to track you, because it would leave your IP in the access logs via your
> mail program.
> >
>
> Yes, that would certainly be possible in principle but i) both spams are
> plain-text only, and ii) it is already easy to find the IP address of my tor
> server based on the contact address (just scan through all few hundred known
> tor servers, conveniently listed e.g. at
> http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/exit.pl?sorbw=1&addr=1
> ).
>
> I am not at all worried, which is just as well given the amount of other
> spam I get :-) I am, however, puzzled as to why anyone would bother to go
> into a non-trivial amount of effort to decipher the email address, only to
> then use it to send a meaningless one-word message.  I suppose an
> explanation might be that the process of harvesting mildly obfuscated email
> addresses from the web has been automated and the resulting email addresses
> were then used by an utterly incompetent spammer. Another possibility might
> be that the spammer had a list of harvested emails not all of which were
> necessarily converted correctly from whatever form of obfuscation was used.
> It would then make sense for them to try to filter out invalid addresses
> before selling the list on, although it is unclear why they would use a
> one-word message rather than a real spam that they could have been paid for.
> I suspect I will never know.
>
>