Submission + - What the hell is going on with spam??
ericscottf writes: Are there any other people who use catch-all and unique email addresses out there seeing this?
I have my own domains and use google apps for the email aspect. It isn't perfect, but it's easy and integrates with the phone, yadda.
So as of the past few months, I've seen the following VERY interesting things happening:
1) Many of my unique email addresses are suddenly getting spam. I'm talking about zappos (not amazon!), ebay, subaru, and a few others that should have good security and have not released any notice saying their databases were compromised. This suggests that either they are compromised and don't know it or are covering it up, or google has been, or they're on a server somewhere that routes traffic between these major companies and google. I'm very confident my account hasn't been hacked. I use 2 factor auth and very strong passwords.
2) Some jackass is spamming catchalls (some friends of mine are seeing this) with garbage email addresses (total random junk like SD8JR43AMZ). This means someone has decided that there is money in spamming sysadmins? Nobody else is going to see these emails. If catch-all is on, the sysadmin gets them (and probably filters them for spam), and if catch all is off, they bounce. What's the point here?
It's all just very odd. I used to understand the purpose of spam, now I'm just confused.
Thanks for listening to me vent.
I have my own domains and use google apps for the email aspect. It isn't perfect, but it's easy and integrates with the phone, yadda.
So as of the past few months, I've seen the following VERY interesting things happening:
1) Many of my unique email addresses are suddenly getting spam. I'm talking about zappos (not amazon!), ebay, subaru, and a few others that should have good security and have not released any notice saying their databases were compromised. This suggests that either they are compromised and don't know it or are covering it up, or google has been, or they're on a server somewhere that routes traffic between these major companies and google. I'm very confident my account hasn't been hacked. I use 2 factor auth and very strong passwords.
2) Some jackass is spamming catchalls (some friends of mine are seeing this) with garbage email addresses (total random junk like SD8JR43AMZ). This means someone has decided that there is money in spamming sysadmins? Nobody else is going to see these emails. If catch-all is on, the sysadmin gets them (and probably filters them for spam), and if catch all is off, they bounce. What's the point here?
It's all just very odd. I used to understand the purpose of spam, now I'm just confused.
Thanks for listening to me vent.