[ILUG] [OT] Hotmail

[Mike Knell]

> For any of you being spammed by Hotmail accounts, I've found that rather
> than e-mailing their "abuse at hotmail.com"
> account as they request, mailing them on "postmaster at hotmail.com" gets a
> much quicker response. (i.e. from 5 days
> down to 12 hours).

Um, this is a bad idea, really - for three reasons. Firstly, Hotmail's
abuse people, who you reach via abuse at hotmail.com, are the people who
actually deal with this stuff. Mailing postmaster@ (an address which,
I suspect, gets a _lot_ of mail) will succeed primarily in annoying
postmasters who then just have to pass stuff on to abuse anyway.

Secondly, in my experience, a lack of response does _not_ mean that 
your complaints have been ignored or not dealt with. A lot of spam runs
are going to produce _enormous_ numbers of complaints from various 
places (don't think you're the only person doing this..) and more often
than not, the already overstretched abuse people don't have time to
respond to everyone individually. Most of the time I talk to abuse people,
I'm lucky to get an auto-ack, let alone a detailed account of what's
happened.

Thirdly, most spam that appears to come from Hotmail, if you do a little
header reading, doesn't come from Hotmail anyway - people do use hotmail
accounts as dropboxes for replies, which are sometimes valid, sometimes
invalid, and sometimes just made up (and therefore annoy the owners of
those accounts, I'd guess). You're much better off complaining to the
relevant people where the offending article / mail was injected (politely,
of course..), although with some of the more bizarre obfuscation techniques
spammers use to (try to!) remain undetectable, it takes an eye for detail
to do this right. A lot of headers can be forged convincingly. The art 
is spotting those which can't.

Mike

-- 
Computer Science System Administrator, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
       mike.knell at cs.tcd.ie -=- http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Mike.Knell/