[HCoop-Discuss] Spam

[Michael Potter]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 08:40:06PM -0500, rob at hcoop.net wrote:
> Alright... found this via a google.
> 
> http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-36,GGGL:en&q=rob%40hcoop.net
> 
> Perhaps we should make this directory only accessible to members?
> 
> -Rob

This google link may have been harvested by spammers, but I don't
think there's a lot of human intervention in address harvesting these
days.  Your address was probably found by a address-mapper-bot.  I
don't know what they are really called, but, like Graham, I've seen
them at work on mail servers I've administered in the past few years.
In logs, it looks like a horde of zombie systems are tasked to
literally guess usernames at various sites.  I've seen tens of
thousands of connections per day from this, mixed-in with the valid
mail logs.

RBLs like Spamhaus do help, along with filtering.

-- 
Michael Potter
mpotter at hcoop.net