Viruses and Spam

Collecting e-mail addresses for spam database is really easy novadays. I have several public e-mail addresses, which I use for maillists and forums. They are present in addressbooks and mailboxes of bazillion of people. It would be fine, if people won't share my e-mail address.

However they do. They do with help of viruses they run on their computers.

In past times, e-mail viruses were politically correct. The one usually get the message from the person he/she know. And it was ok. However novadays, viruses send themselves from any address they manage to find to any other address.

Recently my friend happened to include my private e-mail into a mass-mailing about the important event in his life. It would be ok, if he did include all of us in BCC field. We all went to TO field and viruses caught me! The letter landed in 40 other mailboxes. It happened that one of recipients run virus (it is statistic, it should happen some time anyway)... Virus sent e-mails with all possible combination of from and to addresses. And my private e-mail which I never announced and never used on Internet except private correspondence went to spammer's hands... Why?

I can produce really huge databases for spammers. Any active Internet inhabitant can. I have 200-300 virus/spam messages a day with my mail server tight on SMTP policies. What if I open it? I'll get 1000 spam e-mails and viruses a day! Meaning that I'm passively collecting e-mail addresses. I do not sell that database, but others probably do! Damn it. I'll probably make my mailserver capable both of Yahoo! DomainKeys and Microsoft CallerID techniques. Hope that Google will join the above with the launch of GMail (they'll get loads of spam :).

Conclusion: do not mass-mail people. If you do, use BCC field then... Internet is Network, we are social network, multiplied it is spammer's paradise... BCC is not solution but it stops from virus explosion in your social on-line off-line network.