Spam, Spam, Spam

Anecdotal increase in spam

It started about 3 weeks ago.  I was already receiving a substantial amount of spam, but I saw a dramatic increase in a short period of time.  For quite some time I've accepted that 30% to 50% of my incoming mail would be spam.  Suddenly that number has increased to more than 90%.

I started swapping notes with others.  Almost, but not everyone has noticed this dramatic increase in spam.  I've been trying to determine if there's a specific reason for the increase (legislation changes, etc.) without any success.  If you hear of a reason, I'm interested.

TBCS website harvested by spammers

Several months ago one of our members assured me that his email address had been harvested from our website, and he asked to have it removed.  We immediately removed his address and started researching methods of protecting our members' addresses, but the process was interrupted and I never followed through.  Now I began to see clear evidence in my Inbox that spammers were scraping our website for addresses again.  How can I tell?  I was seeing messages come in that were addressed to TBCS members with an older address that I know appeared on the website on one of our older pages.

Once again, I am looking for ways to counter the spammer's methods.  Once again, I see drawbacks to all of the proposed methods.  The first drawback is simply one of effectiveness.  I'm not convinced that any of the suggestions presented so far will work.

I've enlisted several gurus from the club in a search for the cure, but feel free to suggest a solution if you've heard of one.  However, in light of the situation at the moment, it is necessary to make the following offer: we will remove your email address from any active pages in our web.  This is probably not going to help that much because we are unable to go back through all of our old pages and remove your address from them, but we will do what we can to minimize the damage.  Just Reply to my email and ask me to remove your address (note: your address is only posted if you're a SIG leader or you supply a service to the club.

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Saturday, May 3rd, was the 25th anniversary of the earliest documented email spam when a DEC Computer marketing rep sent an email invitation to every West coast Arpanet address available:   http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html