is spam going to be the downfall of the net?

[BlackStorm]

Do you think spam is going to get out of control and be the downfall of the net?
Or will it stop expanding at such a quick rate, or do you think laws which are soon coming into place will stop most spammers and protect us from getting our inbox flooded?

 

[GordyMac]

Well I can not see the internet ever dying, unless something better comes along.. I am HOPING these laws will stop the damn spam because I am really sick of getting 15 emails flooded with spam daily..

 

[imported_Mark]

spam will not be the downfall of the net... dumb system admins that cannot keep spammers off of their servers will be the downfall of the net. Remember the spam all comes from somewhere and that somewhere is some guy's server. Secure your servers and keep spammers off of them.

 

[gooooogle]

Ever since I got my own domain I made one e-mail which is only known to friends that I trust 100%. I have never had a single spam on it. Just avoid large e-mail companies like Hotmail and Yahoo and you should be fine. Just remember not to register your e-mail to many places and never a site you don't trust.

 

[BlackStorm]

I have a hotmail address which i use if I HAVE to singup to anything,
I dont like to signup to sites which you need your email address for.

I dont mind forums because its far less likely that someone will give your email address to a spammer or sell it.

There are a lot of sites which would do this...I think its totally wrong but some people will do anything to make some money i guess

 

[gooooogle]

Nobody buys separate e-mail addresses. They buy spam lists which are electronic lists that you can import into a certain e-mail program buy just double clicking it. They often have several thousand e-mails on a list. Also some spamers make their own e-mail software making the hole process much, much simpler.

 

[imported_Mark]

There are programs that you can enter a keyword such as "hosting" and it will search a search engine such as google for that keyword. Then the program goes through every single page that it finds from the search and searches for email addys on the pages. You can even set how deep into each website it searches.

google brings up 143,000,000 pages when searched for hosting. Say there is 1 email on each page.

Also you can search @hotmail.com and all the pages that have @hotmail.com on them somewhere will come up in google and the program can then easily grab a bunch of hotmail addresses.... When I tried the program it grabbed probably about 100k emails in 5 minutes or so...

 

[BlackStorm]

I dont put my email on sites anymore, if i do i always put a space between it so spam bots cant pick it up.

Its so easy for spammers to get email addresses now and its very simple for them to code their own programs, you can make it very hard for someone to find where a spam message was sent from if you code your own program, you can change anything you want if you have the knowledge.

 

[GordyMac]

Well, truthfully, no matter how you do write your email down on a website, they can just program their bot or program to just add that "style" and look for it and pick it up. You will be safe for a short time, but not forever.

Also, no matter how you write it, there will always be bored people, surfing the website, copy/paste it right into notepad or wherever by hand.

You can run, but you can't hide from the spam

 

[imported_Mark]

well that is why when you signup with a service use a catchall email address...

for example any email that isnt registered on my server will go straight to my main email account. so when i signup for something such as hosting-talk.net I would use an email like

hostingnet@hybridnetwork.com

that will then goto my main email. but if i start getting spam to that email address I know that a) they sold my email addy and B) i can just block out that email to stop getting spam.

 

[BlackStorm]

i never thought of doing that, I will start doing that because it seems like a good idea.
Also good to know where your email is being found for spamming.

 

[GordyMac]

Yeah.. if you used a different email, named after each site you signed up at, you should be able to see where the spam is coming from, or if they gave your email out to someone else.