You can go to e-mps.org and register all of your email addresses to be
removed from any mass mailing organizations.  It has to be up-dated every
year, (you can elect to have them notify you when the date is coming up).
Mine ran out for a few days and the volume of garbage increased
exponentially over the last couple of days but since I have re-registered
(you submit all of your email accounts and then respond to the website when
they send you a message) the junk mail has nearly disappeared.

Mark

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence Kestenbaum" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 9:47 PM
Subject: Re: AOL whining


> On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Heidi Harendza wrote:
>
> > Also, just for future reference, the spam happens when you use your
account
> > name to post messages online. I get around that by using one account for
my
> > personal and business correspondence, and another for any online posting
or
> > public use of my internet address.
>
> Actually, if you have a fairly simple user name on a popular service like
> AOL or Hotmail, the spammers WILL find it through a dictionary attack.
> In a recent issue of Risks Digest, it was reported that accounts on
> (three popular services), never used for ANYTHING, got a heavy flow of
> spam within weeks of being created.
>
> As I understand it, a server can be set up to query (say) AOL as to
> whether a piece of mail could be delivered to [log in to unmask]  If AOL says
> no, the transaction automatically aborts and the mythical piece of mail is
> never even created.  If AOL says yes, then, they got your address and can
> sell it.  And such queries are a routine part of exchanging and delivering
> mail between Internet servers, so they can't be screened out.  (The
> spammers can forge the originating server address, so each query seems to
> come from a different place.)
>
> Of course, the spam that gets generated to the email addresses they find
> will be full of lies like "here's the information you requested" and "this
> mail is never sent unsolicited".
>
> More often than aaaaaa, aaaaab, aaaaac, etc., the spammers use a finite
> list of dictionary words and names (including combinations of initial
> letters or letter pairs and names), so that a user id like "fdsiufsqq"
> might not be found for a while, if ever.  Of course, that's going to be
> harder for your friends to remember.
>
> Another way to keep an account out of the spammers' gunsights (again
> assuming that the address is never made public on postings or web pages)
> is to use some very obscure domain or ISP that is unlikely to be attacked.
>
>                                  Larry
>
> ---
> Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
> Washtenaw County Commissioner, 4th District
> The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
> Mailing address: P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor MI 48106