Chinese Email

[Neil Jones]

On Wednesday 15 May 2002 09:49 am, Niklas Wahlberg wrote:
> Yep, I'm getting several e-mails a day from Korea advertising everything
> from office supplies to cars to hotels (at least going by the pictures they
> put into the damn e-mails). I'm considering taking my e-mail account
> offline for a month to see if that helps get rid of them. Neil knows
> better, but I think there are companies that actually mine the internet for
> e-mail addresses. The archives of Leps-L and other lists are open to the
> public and an excellent source of e-mail addresses. Damn the capitalists!
> >:-(
>
> Cheers,
> Niklas

You are quite close Niklas, but the majority of these email addresses 
obtained by "grepping usenet", to the use the technical term. They are 
picking stuff up from sci.bio.entomology.lepidoptera across the gateway.

However, there are other methods. Scanning web pages for email addresses. 
Is one. As I have a large website I frequently get messages offering to get 
me listed on hundreds of search engines for a substantial fee. They pick up 
the addresses this way. This is a scam since you get next to zero traffic 
from all but a handfull of search engines.  (What is worth  paying for is to 
get a site designed to get into the top rankings on searches.)

Mining lists themselves for addresses is rare but I have had an example of 
that happening to me.

The bad news is taking your email address off line wont work. I am getting 
messages that I am certain I can trace to specific postings that  I made 
several years ago.

The Chinese and Korean stuff is weird. I think there are a lot of gullable 
people out there paying companies to do this for them without realising that 
the majority of recipients can't understand a word.

Now there is a business opportunity, Welsh spam! I can have the entire world 
spitting and grunting at their keyboards as they try to read it.  I can 
corner the world market in leeks, cockles and laverbread (A kind of seaweed 
dish).

Being serious about it spam is a serious problem. My solution to is to set up 
filters. Anything from the far east  gets sent into a different folder where 
it is easier to handle. Unfortunately, unless you want to switch to Linux, 
you can't run the software that I am using. I don't think Outlook  will do 
the necessary filtering.

--
Neil Jones- Neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk http://www.butterflyguy.com/
NOTE NEW WEB ADDRESS
"At some point I had to stand up and be counted. Who speaks for the
butterflies?" Andrew Lees - The quotation on his memorial at Crymlyn Bog
National Nature Reserve

 
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