Re: [Amc-list] FYI, Unsubscribe doesn't quite work...

[Tom Jennings <tomj@xxxxxxx>]

Just an FYI to the list... others have had what appears to be
"unable to unsubscribe" side effects that are really caused by
spammers, not AMC-list software.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:41:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tom Jennings <tomj@xxxxxxx>
To: ...
Subject: Re: FYI, Unsubscribe doesn't quite work..

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, XXXX wrote:

> I had to unsubscribe about a month ago and it said that I had unsubscribed
> successfully.  I did quit getting the list messages but, every week or so, I
> would get a message from the server saying that my account had been suspended
> for too many bounced messages.

Those are spam, not real AMC-list messages. The fact that you
got a 'successfully unsubscribed' notice, then the AMC-list
posts stopped, means it did work.


The problem:

Spam senders fabricate "From:" addresses that they get
by scanning old-fashioned archives that don't hide email
addresses. The AMC-list archives (using a program called Mailman)
obscure email addresses to 'tomj at wps dot com' so that spam
harvesters don't get them.

The old AMXfiles mailing list program was written long ago,b
efore spam was a problem. Spam harvesters go through old archives
like that to get email addresses.

And many times, spammers just make up addresses. For example,
domain "yahoo.com" is known to have many valid users, like
'john01', 'john02', etc. So they send out literally millions
and millions of spam messages with

	(big list of likely names) --> (big list of known domains)

Where "big" means millions, sometimes tens of millions. For example

	john01@xxxxxxxxx, john02@xxxxxxxxx, ... john9999@xxxxxxxxx)
	john01@xxxxxxx, john02@xxxxxxx, ... john9999@xxxxxxx)
	...

millions upon millions of times.  Per day! With a 0.1%
success rate, 1000 out of every million faked-up emails gets
through. It's so unbelievably cheap to send email that the
economics still works out.

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