3 ms·
a lot of spam nowadays is sent with the explicit purpose of pinging email names and bypassing filters, just to find out of the address itself has a person that
by noodle 18y ago
a lot of spam nowadays is sent with the explicit purpose of pinging email names and bypassing filters, just to find out of the address itself has a person that checks it. war-emailing, as it were
perhaps that email had something like an embedded image or javascript that could/would dial out to tell the spammer that your email address is active.
other tactics i've seen are the "unsubscribe to this email" links on blatant spam which are social engineering attacks to trick the unwitting into telling the spammers that yes, someone is home at this address.
- lethain 18y agoEven if you don't reply, typically the spammer will receive an 'undeliverable notice' from invalid accounts, so silence ought to indicate where an addresses exist.
- brfox 18y agoIn addition to that, maybe some spam filters work by automatically putting a sender on a whitelist if it gets through once, and then after the sender is on the whitelist, he can spam with something real later.
- noodle 18y agoright, and what better way to ping for active accounts than with a (in this case, pretty crappy and almost worthless) bayesian poisoning attack?
- cstejerean 18y agosilence indicates the address exists. a person clicking the unsubscribe link indicates that someone is actually reading the email sent to that address.