A very important lesson (may be somewhat NSFW)
 

Ladies and gentlemen, I've learned a very important lesson.

Never, ever give a porn site an email address, no matter how respectable and unsleazy they may seem. They will only turn against you.

I made this mistake and now I am paying for it (fortunately not literally, though).

I gave hegre-archives my email address to get access to their selection of free pics. This was several months ago. I haven't been back since.

Admittedly, I did have some misgivings about it, but I figured since Hegre is not your typical "CUM-GUZZLING GUTTER SLUTS HUNGRY FOR YOUR COCK RIGHT NOW!" porn site, where was the harm.

This morning, shortly after I woke up, I kept getting email. One every few seconds. They were bounces -- numerous bounces. For mail I'd never even sent. I read one of them -- it was porn spam. Really sleazy porn spam. "Horny housewife"-type stuff. The From: header was forged to be the address that I'd given to Hegre's site.

Needless to say, I freaked out.

I've since stemmed the tide of crap by sending any messages to that address straight to /dev/null, but it still makes me sick to think that spammers are using an address at my domain for this shit. I was also initially concerned about some wannbe vigilante spam-fighter reporting me to my host (well, my host's host, really) in the mistaken belief that I'm responsible for the spam and thus getting me cut off, but I've given a heads-up to the appropriate people so that shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, suffice it to say that I'm never trusting any porn sites for anything ever again. I just wish I hadn't had to learn this the hard way.

[edit]And in case you're wondering, the "CUM-GUZZLING GUTTER SLUTS HUNGRY FOR YOUR COCK RIGHT NOW!" is the potentially-NSFW bit. :p I figured I should put a disclaimer because I'd really hate to be responsible for someone getting chewed out because one of their coworkers happened to walk by and that phrase caught their eye... :p[/edit]

Fortunately I have yet to get those types of e-mails, but I still get spam, no matter how many lists I unsubscribe from. Makes me want to hunt these people down and play golf with their testicles.

Here is a little piece of advice that I got from Maxim. Don't open ANY of these spams, even to unsuscribe. That just validates the fact that your account is active, and they will keep coming. But, I stopped opening all of my spam a couple of months ago, and it hasn't gotten much better, but oh well. It won't get any better by unsuscribing either, so..............

crow_daw, I'm not the one getting spam -- spam is being sent with a forged header, making it look like I sent it, from my own personal domain. Even if I were getting spam, I read my mail with mutt on my Linux box, which will not display HTML (or anything other than plain text) without the aid of an external helper application.

In other words, it's not receiving spam that I'm worried about (I use SpamAssassin and filter out things it tags as spam to another folder), it's being made out to look like a spammer, which is what is happening here.

That is why I keep my address book small. I also only use it for close persoanl friends who I talk to regularly.
I have another account set up on Outlook that I keep all e-mail addresses in. Whenever I need to send it to some of them I have to click drag but I figure the extra time it takes is better than unwittingly sending a virus or fake spam for penis enlargement or horny housewives.
Good luck.

I'm already aware of basic spam prevention tactics. And I've taken it to the next level, as I said, by running SpamAssassin.

I'm protected from viruses by running an email client that does not automatically open any attachments, and I don't open any attachments I didn't ask for. (Even if I did, my mail is read on a Linux box, so Windows- or Outlook-based viruses are not going to affect it.)

It's not a virus that is doing this. My computer is virus-free. It's a spammer who most likely got my address via hegre-archives, because that's the only place I'd given the address in question to.

Off topic but, where can I get a gook at that cum guzzling guttersluts????

They aren't spamming him. They're spamming other people and making it look like it's coming from his email address.

Get a free email account from hotmail or yahoo or some-such place. Whenever any site (especially porn sites) asks for your email address give them that one. Give your regular email address only to your friends, relatives etc. sk

yeah it sux.

i've done that before and had one of my accounts spammed the shit out of. had to abandon it.

Just goes to show you that porn on the web is a high risk maneuver.

I sztick with the news groups myself.

Yup, news groups is the way to go. And a nifty little command-line program called "brag" running in cron on one of my linux boxes...

For spam protection, I'd reccomend http://www.endjunk.com

Yep...that's what I do. I go into my hotmail account once a week and delete all, just to keep it active.

All you can do now is create another account and send e-mails to those you think might be getting spam under your name, explain the situation (perhaps omitting the "I went on a porn site" part) and tell them to only open e-mails from your new address.

Also, when you sign up, check out the options. On hotmail, there was one written all the way down the application form saying "Check here if you want your e-mail address to be accessible on the public domain" or whatever. The box is already checked, which means that upon signing up your e-mail address will be accessible to pretty much every spammer with half a brain. My first account had that, meaning that I got countless spam, but when I noticed this I created a second account and unchecked the box, which cut down spam about 75%.

Here is a trick that I have been using. I have an account which gives me up to 7 email accounts.

I have my base email account that I use for personal use and only give out to real people.

I have setup other email addresses that I use for signing up for sites.

Email addresslike techinfo or investinfo etc.

I did an experiment. I setup an email address of junkmail11 and signed up for a couple free porn sites. Within a couple weeks I was getting quite a few spam emails.

It worked on a cycle of some sort. I would get 3 or 4 emails a day and then bam. 25 emails in a couple hours. When I tired of the experiment I deleted the email address from my account.

I have a spam account.

If i give a email out on the web its that email.

I delete a page of spam first.

Recieve whatever confirmation mails i need and let it fill to its limit again till the next time i need it.

My pop3 is only given to RL friends.

Thanks for sharing this good advice.

Here is a trick that I have been using. I have an account which gives me up to 7 email accounts.
I did this exact same thing...greatest idea ever

that is why i keep two emails.
one for business/social use, and the other for that kind of shiznit

I use mail washer and you can select to bounce the emails back to the spammer. Before I started using it I was getting 2-300 spam emails a day and after about a year of bouncing them I'm down to only 5 or 6 spam emails a day.

I've got an e-mail account that remained spam free for years. Eventually, I got put on some sort of Chinese mailing list. I now get 100 e-mails of garbage ASCII characters every day. Least it makes it easy to spot. =/

The creativity of spammers is only exceeded by those who outwit spammers. It will be a never ending battle. IT is the same way that technological growth always increases in wartime, because the necessity forces people to become more creative.