I am just curious but........

....does anyone know how a site gets a hold of your email address? Why is it that my hotmail junk folder is full of all that ****e? Is it random or have I done something?

Just wondering.

Tom

the cannot get it through "standard" javascript.

but - there is security holes in IE that can even give them your PIN codes for online banking etc!!!

be careful where you are surfing and better use a guest account for suspicious sites.

if you post to forums, newsgroups, if you get email newsletters, etc. they can get your email address.

sometimes even your provider publishes it !!! (like AOL)

since CPU power and network bandwith is no issue nowadays anymore, they can even "guess" accounts... once you received one mail, it contains a link like "<img src="http://1.2.3.4/1x1.gif">. you open the mail, your email proggy requests the file and they know from their server log that your address is valid and being used..

spam is illegal in germany, but i don´t know about other countries.

It is funky-monkey situation with spam in usa - they cannot make it illigal because of laws on freedom of information and speech. There is very fine line indeed between spam and ad, and no judge was able to draw it clearly, that is why it is still legal although most ISP do not allow it nowadays.

How they get your address? Simple as 1-2-3. Robots do that for them. I've seen sources to some of basic ones they got, simple fetch some more-or-less popular boards where email is in source code and filtering out trash they'll get everything with @ in it, then simply do several checks and there you go. That is why more and more you see emails like john@_NOSPAM_smith.com which assumes one will delete nospam thingy before sending email, but robots wont.

Another top thing of getting your email filled with junk is to have one email account and give it out to everyone. I have literally tons of addresses, most of ones I use are on my own box so no spam there, but for boards and public I use yahoo which prooved themselvs as the best free mail provider so far. You rarely get more then 1-2 junks per week, whereas on hotmail you dont have enough time to delete them all before something new will fill up lousy 3 megs.

As for hotmail I guarantee you that MS gives your address away. I registered a hotmail account so that I could use Messenger, and a few hours later spam started to pour in. I hadn't even used my address yet. The good thing is that currently MS is holding more than 500 spam mails that I've recieved in 2 months I don't use the account so I don't care.

I've had mixed results with Hotmail. I registered a four letter name (suprised it was still available!) and I get tonnes and tonnes of junk (probably 300+ a week) but another email, with a far longer address (20 characters) I rarely get any. I think spammers must do what M.Hirsch talked about - guessing hotmail accounts.

So if you want to get less spam, use a hotmail account with a longer name

TommyStone

Another thing to is if you are on one list they sell it to a lot of list. With people trying to pass legistlation agianst this email spam everyone is trying to send mail to as many people as they can before it takes affect. I have notice about 10 times more junk mail then 1 or 2 months ago..

As fast as you get off one you are on 3 more. I just setup a rule to delete them in groupwise..

My condolences on using Groupwise. . . This has to be the worst email server and client on the face of the planet.

I not sure why you think that. It is stable and secure. When the rest of the of the world was cleaning out there Outlook and Microsoft servers with the Melissa, Code Red, and other email type viruses that brought down there email gateways and/or servers we we're up and running business as usual. It is also pretty Programmable as far as writing third party apps.

While it's true it wasn't hit by Code Red or Melissa, it has to have the suckiest address book and addressing system ever created. The client is completely unituitive and buggy as hell, it's like they spent 90% of their time coding the features that only 5% of people use, leaving the important stuff (like a good address book that lets you get data in and out easily) for last.

Plus, managing it is a nightmare, nothing makes sense to anyone but a groupwise guru. These are expensive servers for small businesses to manage, you have to bring in consultants for what should be simple changes.

Our folks have had major problems with groups, "external" email addresses (e.g. anyone NOT on your groupwise system) and migrating data in and out of the application. Sure, you could get third parties to develop features that already exist in nearly every other email client, but who can afford it?

We've been using netware for years, and we're finally going to be ditching groupwise in the near future. Amen!

Anyway, I'm going to be pushing for us to go to for an IMAP mail server with an openLDAP server for addresses (though we'll probably end up going with Exchange. Sigh. . .) I know groupwise can use these protocols, but the source of it's problems is that it tries to do everything, and in the process does a lot of things poorly.

Glad it's working out well for you, though! Wish it was for us, and all the other organizations I know that are ditching it.

There are so many ways for them to get your email its sick. I personally found that the job sites are the worst!!! Hot Jobs, Monster, etc. I was looking for a job and posted a resume. I got flooded!!!!! What are you going to do though?? If your looking for a job are you going to ignore the job sites??? I use the junk mail filter on my hotmail account, and much to my surprise!!! it actually works pretty good. I would say that it keeps about 90% of junk out of my inbox.

Hero Zzyzzx

It sounds like your IT People may not have a grasp on the whole groupwise thing. I am not knocking you or them it takes some time and maybe some training to get it down. I would put groupwise against most email solutions out there. I realize it has a few drawbacks on some features but all and all it is a rock solid system if you have the right hardware and people to maintaining it. I am still learning it luckly my boss knows it like the back of his hand.