Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail?

TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"

ISP ?

[johnjones]

first person I would suspect is the ISP or your webmail

without knowing any details of even the country your in it's kind of hard to guess...

but ISP's use deep packet inspection and even easier I am guessing you fill in your email address for their webmail and they bill you...

regards

john jones

E-mail is Preferable, it can be Filtered

[CodeBuster]

Although it would be best if email marketers were simply swallowed by the earth and sent directly to wherever it is the bad people go, if they are going to continue annoying us then I would prefer that it be through email and not postal mail. At least with email they are competing on our playing field where we have a decisive technical advantage in filtering. If the choice is between them stuffing my post box with paper or trying to stuff my inbox with spam (they will fail due to ThunderBayes [mozilla.org] among others. What's the word? Thunderbird [mozillamessaging.com]) then I say bring on the spam, we are ready.

GMail

[Aladrin]

Once again, GMail is my solution to this. Prior to GMail, I used spamgourmet to keep my inbox clean. The oldest email I have used to get 30,000 emails per month that were all SPAM. Right now, it's getting about 11,000. (I haven't really used that address in a long time.

I have had maybe 10 SPAM emails in the last year make it to that inbox. (It's hosted under Google Apps.)

So once I found out how well Google's SPAM filters work, I quit caring about giving out my main email address. I give it to everything now, and if a company SPAMs me, I just mark it as SPAM. When enough people do that, it seriously hinders their ability to contact their legit customers, and they learn a valuable lesson.

There's a little bit of fallout from people who use the SPAM button incorrectly, but I think Google does its best to account for that, too.

Re:I had enough

[Tubal-Cain]

I use 2 emails, one for spam and one for private mails. Now both my emails are full of junk...

It should be:
One for email from IT persons.
One for registration confirmation and chainmail-forwarders.

Mod parent up: +5, Truth

[berend botje]

Everytime I got a new email adres, there is always that one clueless git that adds my address to one of those cute 'send something funny every week' sites.

Never got that funny, but the spams just starts flooding in.

Now I'm a lot more picky about who gets to see my real address. The rest goes to my temporary catch-all of the month.

Re:E-mail is Preferable, it can be Filtered

[nine-times]

Also, at least email is probably more environmentally friendly then manufacturing the paper, the ink, any other chemicals involved, and then shipping the stuff across country. It's really sad, when you think about it-- all that trouble just to deliver trash to my doorstep.

I know, that's not a novel thought; that's why they call it "junk mail". But it still strikes me funny whenever I really think about it. People almost literally manufacture trash and send it to your address against your wishes, just for you to throw it away without looking at it. What a waste. Not just a waste of materials and a waste of environmental resources, but what a waste of human effort.

Re:Email honeypot traps

[jez9999]

I use a special domain name which maps all aliases (*) to my mail box. Nearly every email I use for online purchases or registrations is custom for that site so when I receive email from an unexpected source I can trace it back to where I originally used it.

I've been doing this for a few years now, because I thought it was a good idea, and here's what I've discovered: very few companies actually seem to sell my e-mail address to spammers. What I tend to get from them is dumb newsletters that they honour my requests to unsubscribe from.

What does happen, however, is that spammers realize that you have a domain with a catch-all set up... it only has to happen once, and you're fucked. They then proceed to mercilessly Joe-job you, setting their spams' From addresses to [e-mail], and many clueless MTAs will still bounce this stuff back at you with 'blocked: spam', 'undeliverable', and a zillion variants of this (in a zillion languages, too). By this time you've given out so many different email addresses to so many different sites that you don't want to risk adopting some kind of whitelist policy because you're bound to forget about 50% of the places you signed up to and accidentally drop all their e-mail. You revert to standard anti-spam tactics, in addition to setting up lots of filters to dump as many bounceback and 'out-of-office' messages you receive also.

In short; this doesn't work well, don't bother.