RE: *** ADMIN: Spamming -- MIDRANGE-L

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if it is Rochester Initiative. They spammed me at work in the past.

I receive about 200 spams a day, but none are from Rochester Initiative. I used to get spam from them way back when my e-mail address was infosys'at'klements.com... but since I discontinued that account, I no longer get anything from them. (There was a day that I received over 200000 spams on that account -- from all different people -- but two hundred thousand in ONE DAY was too much for me, so I closed it.)

There are many other iSeries businesses that do spam me, however. That's why I switched my e-mail from my old address (klemscot'at'klements.com) to having a different address for each mailing list. I'm trying to figure out where they're getting my name from.

Last week they spammed me at home at my domain registration email address, which they could have only gotten by harvesting domain registration email addresses or name server SOA admin email addresses (or buying a dirty address list from someone else).

IMHO, that's a MUCH bigger problem. Especially people who have their database messed up.

I've been receiving a ton of e-mail from iSeries400Experts.com. They've got the e-mail address that I used to register my domain (which isn't used for any other purpose, so it's obvious that they mined it from somewhere.)

All of their messages start with "Dear Mark" or something to that effect. I haven't a clue who Mark is. In the 20 years that I've worked here, we've never had an IT person named Mark.

I also received a lot of spam that had my e-mail address, but was addressed to "John Englehart". I have never heard of this person, and haven't the foggiest idea why I'd be getting e-mail that's addressed to him.

Spam is a problem that may eventually kill e-mail as a viable form of communication.

Currently, if you watch my personal e-mail logs (this is just my personal domain, not that of a company) you'll see 2-3 spam attempts PER SECOND. the logs look like this:

Dec 22 11:08:57 nixie sm-mta[24390]: iBMH8tLw024390: <sheehan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>... User unknown Dec 22 11:08:58 nixie sm-mta[24390]: iBMH8tLw024390: <sheets@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>... User unknown Dec 22 11:08:58 nixie sm-mta[24390]: iBMH8tLw024390: <sheffield@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>... User unknown Dec 22 11:08:58 nixie sm-mta[24390]: iBMH8tLw024390: <shelton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>... User unknown

Those are the ones that don't get through, of course. There aren't as many that do get through, but there are still way more than I need.

So I have tools like SpamAssassin to get rid of the spam. This occasionally will destroy valid e-mail messages, causing me to possibly miss something important, such as a business transaction or a message from a family member.

Likewise, when I have an account like the one that I mentioned earlier that receives 200000 spams a day, there's no way I could read them. I could hire a full-time staff to do nothing else but sort through that mail, and I'd still miss something valid occasionally.

This means that spam is hurting my business. It's causing problems in my relationships with customers. It's definitely occupying a lot of my time, preventing me from getting valid business done.

Why do legitimate businesses still do this? Why would a company like Rochester Initiative or iSeries400Experts.com partake in something that is so destructive? Surely they realize that it hurts their reputation?