Rule #3: Spammers are stupid. In another post to file under “you knew it would happen eventually,” I just got spam sent to an anonymous Spamcop email address. Allow me to explain why this is amusing:
I’m a loyal user and supporter of Spamcop, a free spam blocklist and reporting service. When I get spam I run the source through Spamcop’s parser, which deciphers the headers and scrapes the body for spamvertised urls, and then allows me to send complaints to the ISP where the email originated as well as the webhosts of the sites linked to. In addition to sending these LARTs to the networks responsible, the servers get added to the Spamcop Blocklist to help other list users avoid getting spam from the same source.
Now, we all know that one should never ever respond directly to spam in any way, since that merely validates your email address as a target for more spam. But when forwarding spam to ISPs as part of a complaint, you can still be exposing your address to more spam. Some clueless ISPs merely pass complaints along to the spammers for list washing. Spamcop automatically munges reports for my protection, stripping my address from the headers and sending the report from an anonymous spamcop.net address. Should an ISP want to respond to one of these reports, mail sent to that anonymous address is safely forwarded to my actual address on file with Spamcop.
Evidently some clueless ISP I complained to merely passed that complaint on to the clueless spammer who in turn added a shiny new email address to his spamlist. So now I get email hawking a “Revollutionaary and new peenjs enlaargment devjce!” (actual subject line) forwarded to me via Spamcop.
I’m tempted to report this spam through Spamcop to see if I can start an infinite loop, but I’m afraid that might make the universe implode.
I do the same with porn spam, not with Spamcop but just checking the source header on the whois data bases at ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and RIPE. I noticed today that when I pulled back from the Outbox an email I was forwarding to the servers, some words had been added to it in front of my message. I was very annoyed to see this once before on some spam sent back to me in reply to my submission, and immediately shot off a complaint to the server. thinking someone there was playing Dracula in the blood bank, sending around the spam and adding salacious comments.
I never received a reply, and because of that I won’t bother to apologise now for thinking that server had no integrity. It’s their PR problem. not mine.