On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 09:09:54PM -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:

It seems some spammer has decided to use my email address as his return address, and I am now getting his bounce messages. ... Am I uniquely blessed with this problem, or is this some new way for spammers to ensure they are hated even more than serial child molesters and terrorists.

I think this really crosses the line into blatant illegality, and is a racheting up of spammer scumminess way beyond simply trying to evade filters with P'E'N'I'S and gratuitous HTML in the middle of suspicious words.

I'll see you your email address and raise you a non-published one. I'd like to thank Earthlink for leaving SMTP VRFY on for so long after I signed up with them just to have a way to dial-in while on the road constantly (read: never, ever used the address anywhere except internally to Earthlin). I also get tons of spam to it. A few days ago, I got a bounce to it, from Yahoo, about a bunch of disabled addresses I supposedly sent mail to... Relevant link to someone else who's been more vocal about this: "My Short Life As An Unintentional Porn Spammer" by Mike Masnick <http://www.politechbot.com/p-04445.html> (though I originally saw it on slashdot, but then, people who give a damn about slashdot have already seen the /. url, while everyone else is likely sick to death of message after message being sent here with just a /. link and a title, if they haven't killfiled the most prolific sender already) -- Michael A. Gurski (opt. [firstname].)[lastname]@pobox.com Hail Eris! -><- All Hail Discordia! O- http://www.pobox.com/~[lastname] 1024/39B5BADD PGP: 3493 A994 B159 48B7 1757 1E4E 6256 4570 1024D/1166213E GPG: 628F 37A4 62AF 1475 45DB AD81 ADC9 E606 1166 213E My opinions are mine alone, even if you should be sharing them. "While the people are virtuous, they cannot be subdued: but when once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." --Samual Adams