Re: Phisher tricks other phishers into doing the dirty work for him...

Marty Helgesen <mnhcc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Speaking of phi****ng, etc., lately I've been getting spam consisting
> of a few words, usually including the word "love" and a URL
> consisting of http:// followed
by four groups of numbers separated
> by periods.  I prefer not even to click on them, but does anyone
> know what the perpetrators are up to?

They're giving you the IP address rather than the domain name, perhaps
in hopes that it will make it more difficult for recipients to figure
out where to send complaints.  That used to be far more common.  These
days, there's so much spam that it's completely impractical to post
complaints.  Plus, most spammer websites are hosted in the People's
Republic of Spam.  (I'm still looking for a practical way to get
procmail to block all messages that mention any URL hosted there.)

What I've been seeing a lot of lately are vast numbers of very short
plaintext spams containing WordsRunTogetherLikeThis.  Their subject
line is in that form, one line of the body of the message is in that
form, and there's a second line of the body of the message which
consists of a URL.  There are at least thousands of different URLs,
nor is the text, or anything else about those messages, the same,
making them hard to block.  Of course none get through to me unless
they happen to forge a name or email address on my whitelist, but
there are so *many* such messages directed at me -- over ten million
in January alone -- that dozens every day just happen to forge a name
or address on my whitelist.
-- 
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html
before emailing me.