KW> then the junkmailers will be tying up bandwidth sending
 KW> messages that go nowhere...
Which is one heck of a lot better than having the b@st@rds send junk mail to 
me or any other living being on the planet as that is wasted bandwidth that 
wastes even more resources than letting e-mail drift aimlessly for a few hops 
before it deservedly goes back to the original sender.
 CE> Well, better that they go nowhere than to real ppl :-)  The big junk
 CE> mailer says they mail 4 million a day. 
 KW> i don't know about that... how much time is a system going to spend
 KW> trying to find 1 invalid address? how much time is it going to spend
 KW> trying to find 1,000 of them?
Hopefully enough to greatly discourage the spammers and for the internet 
powers that be to learn respect thier 10's of millions of users rights 
privacy and right to not be harrassed and annoyed just because they have an 
email account.
 KW> and it won't necessarily be the junkmailers system that goes around
 KW> looking for those addresses either... someones service is going to
 KW> suffer somewhere...
How much do you think the "service" of the 10's of millions of users that 
have to wade through a boat load of junk every time they pickup thier e-mail  
is "suffering"? Cripes, because of spam, my two interenet email accounts are 
not much more than an annoyance. What the hell kind of suffering of "service" 
is that? 
The powers that be in the internet won't do a damn thing about junk mail and 
that's aborrent. The only way that people in the internet are going to want 
to do something about junk mail is when junk mail does indeed use so much 
band width sending to empty address's, that like the fidonet, the internet 
invokes rules disbarring it. Right now they have no rules about spam and 
spammers what-so-ever, anyone can do spam and spam is perfectly fine. 
Obviously internet has no inclination to give a damn about individual users 
being harassed and loss of "service" and that will have to change before an 
individual user will ever not be harassed en mass by the hustlers, shysters 
and other scum using the internet to spam.
After learning the hard way, I -never- give a correct e-mail address in 
anything I use on the internet anymore. Newsreaders, forms, whatever. If 
everybody did that, spam would disappear off the internet in a few weeks. I 
certainly have learned the hard way to -never- reply to junkmail asking them 
to please stop sending me thier crap, as all that does is verify my address 
to them and allow them to sell it to some one else as having been "verified", 
which causes a mushrooming of junk email to me. Shoot, I get so damn much 
spam that using my two E-mail accounts for anything worthwhile is impossible. 
I give my fidonet internet E-Mail address out now for people that I want to 
send E-mail to me. Much better than using my ISP accounts anymore as I don't 
think the spammers software can understand e-mail address's as complex as the 
fidonet internet addressing scheme. I'm just letting the junk mail build to 
my two email accounts using diskspace on my ISP's hard drive, not mine. I 
don't plan on picking it up for at least another 6-12 months if even then 
.
 KW> a better way to deal with them is to mail their postmasters
 KW> and tell them of the abuse the user in question is guilty of...
Ah this is just plain niave, because the postmasters -absolutely- don't care 
as they are making money off the spammers. There are now many and a rapidly 
growing number of sites on the internet that are expressly designed for and 
cater to companies that spam and even collect e-mail addresses for the people 
and companies that use thier "services". America Online is one of them. The 
only thing a postmaster might care about if you complain about spam to him is 
that a spammer using a standard $19.95/month account to spam from when they 
are selling more expensive designed expressly for spamming accounts that they 
would make much more money off from. That is probably the -only- reason they 
would discourage a spammer. I doubt that there is an ISP around that  gives 
one hoot in hell about thier customers harrassing you with spam unless they 
aren't getting paid enough from the spammer for it.
 CE> Yes that has resulted in AOL and CIS taking steps to get rid of the
 CE> spammers/junkers that were using their services.  But when I try to
 CE> return junk/spam it always comes back as undeliverable, so their
 CE> address is phoney.
This just ain't true as AOL and CIS are the big time sellers of specialty 
spammer e-mail accounts. A very large portion of spam that I get comes from 
AOL and Compuserve. Could be (but I doubt it) that AOL has tried to protect 
thier paying customers from spam, but they are promoting spam to everyone 
else by giving spammers anonymous email address's so that they can spam from 
AOL and Compucircus with complete freedom (which is why email you send to 
them comes back as undeliverable). No doubt these are "special" accounts that 
AOL and others are charging -much- more for than a "standard" e-mail account, 
which would be a more logical explanation as to why AOL and Compuserve is 
discouraging spamming from a standard AOL email account as you seem to be 
suggesting or have "heard".
 CE> Even when they have a Remove feature for getting
 CE> off their lists it doesn't work, and the mags say they use the
 CE> 'remove' feature to tell them that you are a 'live' address to keep
 CE> using rather than a dead one.  To be able to sell their spam lists
 CE> they have to keep their ratio of working addresses to 80% of their
 CE> list. 
That is the way they do it. -Never- send a REMOVE message or any other 
message back to them. Spammers and sites that sell thier services to spammers 
are a very sneaky unscrupulous lot. A person should not feel a bit abashed 
about using phoney e-mail addresss that cause spammers to send tons of 
useless mail all over the planet. That's probably the only way that anyone is 
ever going to get them to stop or even slow down. You sure as hell aren't 
going to get anything done about it by sending polite e-mail to AOL, 
Compuserve or any of the other many ISP's that are making money off off 
spammers using thier websites to send their junk mail from and have made 
special reservations for them as compared to an ordinary user. The ordinary 
user gets absolutely no respect from sites like that and probably never will.
 KW> what amazes me is that i can get up to 7 junkmails a day just from a
 KW> couple posts in alt.comp.virus...
Use a phoney E-Mail address in your newsreader and there will be 7 useless 
E-Mails going somewhere else every day. Spammers and ISP's that provide 
special services to spammers, have software that captures e-mail address from 
newsgroups, which is the major source of e-mail addresses that are sold to 
spammers. What do you usually need to put a real e-mail address in a 
newsgroup for anyway? Better to only put your real e-mail address in a 
specific message, and then code it so that the spammers software can't 
decypher it into a real e-mail address, but a walking talking thinking human 
being can. IE My real E-mail address could be cholten@myisp.com. I would put 
my email address in my news reader as Nospamcholten@nospammyisp.com and as a 
tearline tell human readers to remove the "nospam" from my email address to 
get my correct email address. That foils the software that scans every 
message in the 25,000 or more internet newsgroups everyday for e-mail 
address's to spam to, yet does allow a human being reading your newsgroup 
messages to know your e-mail address. It's the only way to discourage and/or 
stop spamming. Ordinary users have no need to feel guilty about causing 
e-mail to be sent to non-existent address. We have a right to protect 
ourselves from the abusers and mashers of the internet and if that causes a 
bunch of unnecessary traffic on the intenet, all the better as then something 
might be done about it. It isn't the 10's of millions of us ordinary users 
that initiated it, it is the spammers and companies that give special service 
to spammers like AOL and Compuserve that did that. We have every right in the 
world to try to avoid spam in anyway we can, phoney e-mail addresses being 
one of the best ways available for an ordinary user to accomplish that feat.
--- Maximus/NT 3.01b1
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