The All-Season SPAM Harvest
For the past two years I have had a closely guarded yahoo account that I've used for personal business. I gave it an esoteric name to thwart spammers from guessing the account. Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks ago I opened my inbox and was greeted by a torrent of spam. Had yahoo sold my account? Had I been careless with the account and used it on a crooked site?
Whatever the case, it had suddenly been added to various spam lists and it was getting lots of attention from the evil spammers. The genie was out of the bottle and it was time to move on to another account. But a couple of days later, I found the culprit, and of all the suspects it was me who had leaked it out. While crafting a new page on a site I was working on, I had used that account to test the page's functionality. When the page went into production, the email somehow crossed-over to the production version and suddenly it was plastered all over the site. Within one day of posting the new page, it was harvested and paying tremendous dividends to the spammers.
Now everyone (myself included) knows that harvesting emails from Web pages is one of the most utilized techniques by spammers. But the speed at which the email was found and targeted even surprised me.
Moral of the story: if you like spam, don't bother submitting your email to various sites. Post it on a Web page for a day, and watch with amazement how the spammers swarm around it like vultures on a carcass. (With apologies for debasing vultures.)
Give a few Sats