email addresses and spam

[Chuck Swiger]

On May 24, 2007, at 12:02 PM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
> All right, who released my email address to spammers?

Nobody.  Spammers routinely search for email addresses by scraping  
Google, websites, mailing list archives, and even word-list  
dictionaries or random number generators.

> I send mail to ports at freebsd.org, and 2 weeks later I get spam.
> That is not cool, people. You MUST make sure that never happens.
> Now I have to blacklist this address. Sheesh.

Welcome to the Internet, as (presumably!) you are new here.

The FreeBSD postmaster already spends a lot of resources to try to  
keep these mailing lists (mostly) spam-free, but there's nothing that  
we can do to prevent a spammer from sending email to you after you've  
chosen to make your email address available by sending mail to a  
public list, and this is going to be true of other mailing lists  
elsewhere, web forums, Usenet, and so forth.

Most people deal with spam by setting up some combination of MTA  
checking, greylisting, and spam-filtering via Amavis/SpamAssassin/ 
dspam/ClamAV/etc rather than creating new email addresses, but you  
can do as you see fit.

-- 
-Chuck