[DECtalk] Another important message about last night's spam

[Jayson Smith]

Hi again,

Earlier today, someone replied to one of the spam messages, asking them 
to stop spamming. Unfortunately, this reply probably contained the spam 
link in the original message, so it was rejected as spam by a few 
providers. In the future, if spam goes out on this or any other list, I 
would suggest just ignoring it completely. Don't reply and ask them to 
stop, don't berate them for spamming, etc. Just ignore it. If the spam 
came from someone you happen to know, you could contact them privately 
and let them know their Email account has probably been compromised, but 
once spammers get hold of their address book, there's not much anyone 
can do about it.

The way this probably happens is as follows. Someone subscribes to a 
list. This is usually someone using one of the mega Email providers like 
Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. Later, that account's username and 
password are compromised. There are many ways this could happen and I 
won't go into them here. At any rate, whatever hackers or spammers now 
have that info log in and download the person's address book. They then 
send Emails which appear to come from that Email address to addresses in 
that address book, hoping to catch that person's friends and associates 
off guard. When such a message goes to a mailing list, the list software 
accepts it, since it looks like a message from a legitimate subscriber.

Once I saw a message come to a few mailing lists from someone I know 
from those lists. He said he was in England and had been mugged, and was 
asking people to click a link to send him money via Western Union or 
some other payment service. A few minutes later, when the real person 
got wind of those Emails, he sent a followup message to the lists 
explaining what had happened and telling people not to believe those 
earlier Emails.

Jayson