[lug] SPAM (was: email mystery)

[Deva Samartha]

S..t - I goofed,  the address I was refering to - with the service is

spamcop.net - sorry.  I have it bookmarked and just click it.

The spamcop.com site is a reference site, mainly, the reporting service is 
done from  spamcop.net.

>If those addresses were replaced by a single address that allows a
>request to look up the original *real* address, all spam would end up
>going to that one address. But a reply could still be automated if the
>request were phrased in some defined fashion.

AFAIK - the original mailman list manager software allows a feature to 
totally replace the email addresses in posts with the mailing lists name 
but then nobody knows who posted.  Or one can 'hide' the email addresses in 
posts and make it a little bit less obvious, like Bob at bitbucket.net   would 
be shown in archives and list members as bob at bitbucket.net so robots 
won't see it - hopefully.

I had a robot coming in once, looking at one archive page, after 20 
minutes, coming back again, looking at the next archive page....
it was a  crawler12.bos2.fast-search.net where I could not figure out who 
it is. I eventually blocked his access on the firewall. They kept trying 
for a long time.

Well, then there is sugarplum:

http://www.devin.com/sugarplum/

Which is fun....

S.