Spam from submitting to search engines

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Spam from submitting to search engines

how on earth?

edit_g

11:25 am on Oct 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

When we first started submitting a new site to SEs I set up a mail account called submissions@ourdomain.com. The only time I have used this is when SEs ask for an email when you submit a pages for crawl or inclusion. I've only ever submitted to the big SEs, not the spammy "submit your site to 6,000,000 SEs... My question is- how on earth do I end up with about 20 419 scams and hardc0re p0rn in there every morning? Would it have made a difference if I called the account "eggbert" or something equally absurd? I just don't understand how the email addy can go from, for example, the Google submit form to some spambot in Nigeria. Any ideas?

chiyo

11:29 am on Oct 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

Some ideas..

1. Spammers often take a domain they know is legit and add on many common prefixes like webmaster@yourdomain.com or editor@yourdomain.com and sometimes any possible 3 to 4 letter combinations. submissions seems a bit less common but common enough.

2. Your email address has been sold by one of the search engines to a spam mail list company, and heaps of people have bought the list.

im sure they have lots of other things up their slimy sleeves.

creative craig

11:33 am on Oct 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

Email harvesters
They got lucky and guessed

I cant remember the name of the protocol myself (maybe some one can tell me), but your ISP can catch your email address, and when you go to a web site the sites server can request your address from your ISP if they have it enabled! Doubt this happend to you but there are lots of other thing that could go on.

Craig

CuriousWeb

11:38 am on Oct 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

I think that there might be some way of generating possible email addresses for domain. For example I got so fed up with my hotmail (home of spam!) account that I decided to open as new one about a year ago. Less than an hour later I had received about 5 spam mails.
(Either that or the hotmail account had been previously used and the membership had expired)...

edit_g

3:30 pm on Oct 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

The strange thing is- editor, info, webmaster and a few other standard ones are already set up. They get hardly any spam at all... I think it must be that one of the SEs (or more) are actually selling these email addresses. Which is quite depressing, because as I said, I only submitted to the top SEs (maybe 10 of them)...