SPAM -- Interesting Observation

[linuxdoctor]

Like everybody else, I'm tired of SPAM and by far most of it are related to selling me sex products of one variety or another. One of the popular myths about SPAM, long exploded, was that you only get this sort of stuff if you sign up to sexually explicit mailing lists or other subscription services. As far as I could tell this has never been true, but it's one that I still hear from time to time. I personally have never signed up to any of these kinds of sites or services yet the volume of sex related SPAM that I receive is staggering.

Out of curiosity I decided to see what happens when I actually do visit these websites and subscribe to their mailing lists and internet groups. I joined about fifty of them pseudonominously, being careful to select "I do not want to receive special offers in my e-mail" (or whatever the phrasing was) if these places bothered to ask and waited for the SPAM to arrive.

Almost immediately I began to receive some SPAM a few at a time. I expected the volume to increase quite quickly for, after all, I signed up for these services didn't I? To my amazement the volume SPAM never increased much beyond than a trickle. It's been about three months now and I still receive only a handful of SPAM at that e-mail address. In the past it has been my experience that if I signed up to a practically any (non sex related) website it would be only hours before I would receive fifty or a hundred unwanted SPAM messages but this time, relatively little. Practically nothing in fact when compared to what I get on all my other e-mail addresses.

This result actually surprised me. I had expected to receive ten times as many SPAM e-mails as I normally do. In fact, I wanted to receive them but they never turned up. These surprising results seem to indicate to me that if you don't want to receive sex related SPAM sign up to sex sites.
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Misanthrope: someone who realizes that humans really are as stupid as they appear.

If you think I'm 'politically' incorrect you have the wrong politics.

[Necromis]

LD, I could have saved you some time for this. I have a work Email address that I use only to communicate with internal parties or clients. I have never used this on any other sites, especially anything related to sex. However, I receive 5+ spam emails daily on this account. They do get caught by the spam filter for our work, but because they could be real emails they send us an internal email listing what mail came in that is potential spam. The result to this is to indicate that the spam software simply attempts to find names at any domain email location and just mass generates based on common user names. I never got any spam on one of my free accounts that had a very obscure name.

[linuxdoctor]

[Necromis]

well my Name on that email acct was RiseOfTheKutan. Which was the sub-title to a game I was building a website for. Additionally make sure it is never used on any site, even forums. If a forum is hacked alot of times it is for the Email addresses, too.

[linuxdoctor]

I went out deliberately giving out that name on various sex sites, mailing lists and groups expressly to get SPAMed by them. The relative silence was deafening. It almost seems to me that SPAMers are not sending their stuff to people already interested in that sort of stuff but are trolling for new clients.

This was a one time thing so I can't claim anything like scientific accuracy here. It's just an interesting observation and something that I didn't quite expect.
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Misanthrope: someone who realizes that humans really are as stupid as they appear.

If you think I'm 'politically' incorrect you have the wrong politics.

[Pie32]

It would make sense for sex websites not to spam people, if you think about it. Most of those kinds websites have a monthly fee, so they want people to keep coming back, month after month. A good way to scare people away from your website is to spam them. Nobody likes spam. If someone learns that their favorite sex website is spamming the hell out of them, they are likely to cancel their subscription and stop paying the website. It's all business.
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[Scar]

I've read some where that when you click that link it verifies for them that you have gotten the email. So they'll send you more. I think i saw that on some news article about spam years ago.

I don't get much spam with google.
But i hate the email providers that obviously sell your email address and info to spam companies. such as inbox.com.

I had that account for less than 3 months before i was overloaded with spam and i cant seem to filter out with the build in filter settings. And i rarely used the email address in public, so there is no way the spam people could of just have picked up my email addy from a site with their spider thing. the company had to of boughten rights to spam the members.

I think hotmail used to be like that also, but they stopped apparently because i got a new @live.com email account and i don't get any spam at all.

I wonder if spam mail even works. Most of it is blocked and filtered with most email clients and no one really read them anyways, at least i never do, so i think its a lost cause.

Also spam doesn't seem to be that much of a problem because email providers are offering at least 1 gig of space and you don't have to worry about the spam filling up your email space quota before you can delete it, so its cool - as long as it gets put in the junk/spam folder.
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http://www.damnidunno.com

[kenoodo]

All my e-mail accounts are free ones, and of course, there are lots of spam mails everyday. I believe that the filters are all good, but as the spamers are getting better and better, that's really sad to say so, the spamers can find their ways to keep spamming.

Unusual user name might be a solution, but that would be not easy for you and your friends to remember that complicated spelling email address.

But I do not have enough time to read all my emails everyday, even those are sent from news groups that I am in. I sort them and put them into folders, and done. As there are enough room, unlimited, for all my emails, few spam is acceptable.

[linuxdoctor]

[spock]

[Jacky]

I used to have problems with spam mails. I receive at least more than 10 per day.

I did a switch of email account (not because of spam, rather because of the address I want).

It has been 7 months since I did the switch. I vaguely remembered that I got like 2 spam mails the other time, but I already deleted those 2. And till now I have not received any spam mails.

It's really easy to avoid spam.

Always sign up for 2 email accounts. Nowadays email accounts are mostly free, you can sign up for as many as you want.

Use one as the main account (the one which you use to receive important emails), and the other one as a "shield" account.

For the past 7 months I have been very careful with sites that I use my email address for. I only use this email account when I sign up for forums, for known sites (YouTube, etc.), IRC nicknames registrations and to contact someone else for inquiries (e.g. someone selling a product).

For those sites that I don't really trust (even those that claim they won't reveal your email address to 3rd parties), I use an alternate account which I have abandoned.

I am using Gmail with a .NET Passport (MSN aka Windows Live, for MSN/Windows Live Messenger).
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[coralvalley]

Wow, I have to admit that is a really interesting observation considering that I would have drawn that same conclusion that you had about if you had signed up for sex related sites that you would wind up receiving even more spam from those types of situations. I cannot even begin to tell you how many SPAM messages I get from sex related ads, and other things that they try to send me when I have not at all signed up for any of those things. I will admit that they do make me laugh at times because some of the subject lines clearly shows just how poorly the spam is sent out there as they send things that obviously aren't of interest to me, but their subject lines clearly lead me to believe they are trying to appeal to someone of the opposite gender and they are sadly out of place.

It is interesting how you tested the theory to see what would happen. I am really interested that things wound up going that way, but at the same time it was a neat theory to test out and clearly that says a lot about what kind of sites want to send you that kind of spam. I never would have thought that it would be that kind of situation where the normal sites wind up doing that, but apparently they do. Thanks for letting us know about your findings.