what to do with scammers?

[id10t]

OK, we've all seen emails from our best friends in Nigeria wanting help moving money, jewels, and old Porsches out of the country.

Some of us have seen things like 419eater where scammers are baited, with spectacular results like the cult of the red breast , the
p-p-p-powerbook , etc.

Here's one for the records. Pic is NSFW, but funny as heck. The LJ link is to a community that posts stuff that will make you go either "WTF!" or "OMGZ!" or both. Lots of sick NSFW stuff there as well, in case you decide to go browsing for more.

http://community.livejournal.com/wtf_omgz/1284110.html

[Moneyguy1]

I may miss out on some hilarious posts, but I simply delete anything where I do not recognize the sender. Simply opening a post can alert the sender that your address is a valid one.

[id10t]

Moneyguy1 - the lack of a SMTP bounce indicates that the address is valid, or the mail server is acceptign all mail and just null routing those that don't have valid recipients. Uisng HTML in mail - loading a remote image, etc. with a unique name/url for each recipient would tell you if an address is good and if a warm body actually opens the mail for that address.

[Moneyguy1]

(Said with all sincerity)

English, please?

Maybe I just err on the side of extreme caution.....

[id10t]

Moneyguy1 - SMTP is the protocol used by mail clients and servers to send mail from the client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) to the server (your ISPs outgoing mail server) to another server (recipients ISP). If said recipient doesn't exists, a bounce message should be sent - something like "unknown recipient" or similar. Try sending mail with a regular client to thisdoesnotexist@gruv.org - it will bounce. If it doesn't bounce, then it means that on my server - I own gruv.org - I've configured some action to happen when that address gets mail - either deliver it to another account or make it disappear and don't send anything back to the originating server.

Now if I wanted to make sure your address was good, I'd include an image that had a URL associated with it in the message - like sending a webpage, HTML mail can pull in remote images. So I include an image that lives at www.gruv.org/spamimages/moneyguy1ataoldotcom.gif . Now this doesn't exist, but since I only sent it to you (I haven't actually), all I have to do later is look at my web server access logs and error logs and see which addresses show up looking for an image - moneyguy1ataoldotcom in this example.

Of course, this still won't work if you've set your mail clients to not display HTML mail, or if it does allow HTML mail, it won't display remote images (so it won't ask my server for the pic, etc).

Summary - don't worry about it. It is simply assumed that all messages get thru, and only 0.1% of the people that get it will be scammed/affected/buy the fake viagra/etc. Of course, when you send 10,000,000,000 mails, that 0.1% can still pay off big time.

[Moneyguy1]

Thanks. Us old guys can be technologically challenged at times. When I was heavy into computers, it was with FORTRAN, COBOL, and the like. I use the internet mostly for research and letter writing.

[id10t]

Don't feel bad. I had a semester of both FORTAN and COBOL as a freshman in High School. It was the senior level programming class....

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Moneyguy1
I may miss out on some hilarious posts, but I simply delete anything where I do not recognize the sender. Simply opening a post can alert the sender that your address is a valid one.

That's why I use web based email most of the time. I can look at the sender and title without opening the message. If it's placed in my spam folder, I can open t without alerting the sender I've looked at it. Most get flusehed.