No Spam (Yet)

I've had my new internet connection, with its new email address, for a month now and have yet to receive a single piece of spam. Heck, the only email that account has received at all were a couple of test messages I sent on the first day.

To what do I owe this tremendous success? Well, for starters I haven't sent anyone email with the account in question (and no, I won't divulge the address here).

I did, in a moment of temporary insanity, use the email address when creating an account at an e-tailer. I was at a kiosk in the B&M instantiation of the business and wanted to buy something. This particular merchant is almost a pure play internet business, but does allow locals to walk in and buy things without having them shipped. The trick is that you still buy from the internet (hence the kiosks). Anyway, their shopping cart requires that you have an account and login to buy anything. I use unique passwords with all of my accounts and record them on yellow sticky notes on the underside of my keyboard. But since I wasn't home I couldn't look under my keyboard, so I was sort of stuck. So I created the new account.

That was less than a week ago, and I suppose it will take a while before the virus grows enough to be detected. But for now I am still blissfully free of symptoms and so I will continue to live my life as always.

As a point of comparison, I had an account with Earthlink for about four years and never used that account for any e-commerce, memberships, sweepstakes, bulletin boards, etc. But it got spam regularly. I don't recall how long it took for it to start getting spam, though.

It is known that spammers try random user names with known domain names, hoping for a hit. So it's a really bad idea to register a user name like "smith". I suppose that's how they hit on my earthlink address. Oddly, many people add supposedly random numbers to the end of their user names in the hopes that this will ward off the spammers. But if the spammers can send a million messages at no cost, what's to stop them from sending to every possible variation of "smitty1053280@aol.com"?

Another thing, we know that spam email written in HTML has a couple of tricks to verify your address, like including a graphic with a link of the form

<img src="http://spam.com/dot.gif?joey104338@hotmail.com">

That's why I use POP and an email program that doesn't display HTML (unless I want it to). But lots of people just love webmail and the providers seem blissfully unconcerned that they are exposing their users to more spam by not giving them the option to render messages in plain text. Maybe they get more users by touting their anti-spam features, and that is only effective if the users get lots of spam unless they turn on the anti-spam feature.