[Mediawiki-l] spam bots

[Brian]

Your gmail address is fairly flexible. Suppose your address is 
foobar at gmail.com 

You would receive mail sent to 

   - fo.obar at gmail.com 
   - f.o.o.b.a.r at gmail.com 
   - foobar+flotsom at gmail.com 
   - foo.bar+flotsom at gmail.com 

So if you sign up at amazon.com <http://amazon.com> with your 
foobar at gmail.com e-mail account, you use foobar+amazon at gmail.com. Then you 
check the address that your spam was sent to, and if it is from 
foobar+amazon at gmail.com (highly unlikely as it is), you can take action from 
there, including sending an upset letter, closing your account with them, 
and automatically nuking all of the e-mails sent to that address with a 
filter.

It's also useful for categorizing mail by address. Want to make sure you 
don't miss an important e-mail from a friend? Give them 
foobar+jeff at gmail.com, and set up a filter to automatically star messages 
sent to that address.

This doesn't work quite as well on mailing lists. Suppose you signed up here 
with foobar+wikitech-l at gmail.com. Then, everytime you want to post to the 
list you need to go into your settings and change your reply-to address 
before and after you send the mail. If you're already typing the message, 
you have to open a new window and set it (or save your e-mail as a draft and 
navigate away from it).

I might put together a greasemonkey script that makes this functionality 
more accessible by adding an extra field before To: that says From:

If you use an external client that supports this functionality, Gmail will 
let you send mail from any address via an SMTP server. It's not that it's a 
bad feature, just that it's inaccessible (likely intentionally).

/Alterego


On 7/18/05, Jamie Bliss <astronouth7303 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 7/17/05, Brian <reflection at gmail.com> wrote:
> > When I sign up for a commercial website, I use the + gmail operator so 
> that
> > I know if they sell my address. For instance, if I sign up at
> > foobar.com <http://foobar.com><http://foobar.com>,
> > I would use reflection+foobar at . Then when I start getting spam I know 
> where
> > it came from. Since this is a mailing list, it's a pain in my rear to 
> change
> > my displayed address everytime I want to say something to
> > reflection+wikitech-l@, so I had to use the base address of just 
> reflection.
> > When you do a google search for my e-mail address, the only results are 
> from
> > this mailing list. (a couple others are similar, but not mine). That 
> means
> > that the 2-3 spam messages I get per day on this relatively new address 
> are
> > from this mailing list.
> 
> the + gmail operator? Can you explain? Or send a link?
> 
> -- Jamie
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/
> Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!
> Have lots of invites. Gmail now has 2GB.
>