yeah the spammers never will tired of spamming. i'm sure maybe a couple of those sites that were spamming you have closed down by now, but of course they gave your email out to a couple of people before doing so.
a four letter domain, quite nice, makes me think of what all the URLs are going to look like 10 years from now, haha. i'm a little curious as to what the domain was, care to tell me? if you don't wanna post it a PM would be fine with me, but if you wanna withhold that information, i understand that :)
my hotmail account is nothing but garbage, poop, and spam, but i still gotta get on every 30 days just so it doesn't expire, bah i hate hotmail. why not make a new email off of the 4 letter domain? i mean, i know you're losing all sorts of sentimental value, but that address has been tainted with spam :(
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Ross
You mentioned how they were wasting their resources to send mail to that address, and I think that's the underlying truth that all spamming is based on - the fact that sending e-mail is free and uses a negligible amount of resources (for all intents and purposes, zero). So the spammers' lists just keep growing and growing, and it makes little difference if the mails bounce or not. They figure, why not send mail to addresses that haven't worked for years? It's all free anyway.
This is why one of the ideas to combat spam was to add a tiny fee to sending e-mail. Even if it's only like one cent per e-mail, that could be enough to destroy spammers' profit margins. But implementing such a plan would require a huge amount of time and coordination across the net - so it'll probably never happen.
d2312564 (Updated )
That's a really good point. I remember my dad told me they were looking in to implementing the small charge for sending email many years ago, but it never materialized. It seems like it would stop spammers, but it would cause so many problems with mass NON spam emailings like Newgrounds does each night, and other services.
In my opinion, the spam spawns from the pathetic ease of obtaining a free email account with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and MANY more. I think there's an easy way to fix this. All free email service providers should be required by LAW to get the physical mailing address and phone number of all account openers. I don't know how they would authenticate them, but they can do an automatic calling code or something. Because it's obvious if spammers were aware that email providers had their personal information, they wouldn't want to be caught red handed doign something illegal.
But yeah, again, you make a good point. I guess they have nothing to lose by keeping sending mail to the address, and also, list sellers keep it on the list probably so they can boost their "email address count" when selling lists.
Thanks for the comment.