unexpected spam

you may recall me saying here or there that i have a 100% spam free email address... it's an address that i don't give out to people or sites... it's not that the address is unused - i actually use it a lot, but i use it in conjunction with sneakemail.com so it's not my real email address getting spammed - and because i use a different sneakemail address at every site it's no problem to just deactivate or even delete the address and not deal with that site anymore (see my post on avoiding spam)...

so as a result i don't check the spam folder very often - it's almost always empty and when it's not the messages in it are almost always in there erroneously... it's so rare that i actually hand out any address to an organization that will compromise it to spammers (or spam it themselves) that i see more false alarms from the spam filter than i see true alarms...

that all changed with a vengeance today as i found over 50 messages in my spam folder and almost all of them were correctly classified... and wouldn't you know it, the majority were addressed to the sneakemail address that i used for demonstration purposes in this post on phish detection... it certainly took a while for the spammers to find that one (i wonder if they liked the spam poison i laid out as well)...

unfortunately that wasn't the only address that was receiving spam... i don't pretend to know what exactly happened here, but the unique, randomly generated, unguessable address i used to sign up to for ethicalhacker.net has also started receiving spam... the chances of spammers finding that address by enumerating the sneakemail address space are incredibly low (it's a 7 digit base36 number) especially since i have quite a few sneakemail addresses and this is the only one getting spammed by this particular person using the freetellafriend.com service... somehow the folks at ethicalhacker.net let my email address get compromised so you can bet i won't be dealing with them any further (not that i did much there in the first place)...

so anyways, it was quite a shock to see so many spam messages in the spam folder of my spam free email account, but they were all sent to disposable addresses (not the real one) that are no longer reachable so it's all good...