Re: [Groff] Spam from list member addresses

[Peter Schaffter]

Ted --

Thanks for the info you provided.

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005, Ted Harding wrote:
> I don't know what to suggest about it. It's extremely
> irritating, and could be misinterpreted by people who don't
> understand how it works, leaving a few of us with bad
> reputations! What's intriguing is that only 3-4 groff
> subscribers have ever appeared as "senders", most often
> myself. If this were one of the standard spoofers, then
> "senders" would be randomly chosen from someone's address
> book or whatever, and by now many of us should have appeared.
> Nor am I aware of this particular genre appearing on
> other lists to which I belong (nor sent to other lists
> which I manage, where I would see them in any case whether
> they made it through or not). This tends to suggest
> a certain selectivity or even targeting.

Though not prone to conspiracy theories, I, too, get a "targetted"
feeling from this.  The spam is inevitably porn mpegs, the titles
for are all similar, somehow (same sorts of misspellings, same
upper/lowercase aburdities, etc).  They have, in the past, come from
only a few spoofed addresses, by far the most frequent of which is
Ted Harding!  I never get this type of spam appearing to come from
other than gnu.org.  Furthermore, my present email address has been
bot-proofed to the greatest feasible extent.

Given the precise nature of the spam target (the groff list), and
the precise nature of the spoofed addresses (just a few groff list
members), the only theory I can come up with is that someone is, or
has, manually scanned the list and chooses victims from it.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
  Author of _The Schumann Proof_ (RendezVous Press, Canada)
  http://www.golden.net/~ptpi/theschumannproof.html