[oclug] How to catch privacy liars with Qmail

[Dan Cardamore]

Hey all,

I've switched to qmail several months ago and started using a very
interesting anti-spam, anti-anti-privacy-policy feature.  Qmail allows
you to receive any mail destined for $userid@$domain, it also lets you
recieve any email destined for $userid-$something@$domain.  So what I've
been doing is when I sign up for something on the net and they ask for
my email address I give them my address as
$userid-$theircompanyname@$domain.  This way when I eventually recieve
a spam, I can track down who sold the address to the spammer.  I caught
my first one yesterday.

I signed up for a boxfrog.com email account because it claims "anonymity
and privacy".  If you read their privacy policy you'll see that they
should never disclose email addresses to spammer.  yesterday I got an
email to my -boxfrog email saying that my cousins friend just turned 18
and that I should go to her website... yadi yada...

What makes qmail so great is that you can give any company your email
address, and if you ever do get spam on that address, you can /dev/null
it, or report them for violation of their privacy policy.

Dan

__________________________________________________________________________
    Dan Cardamore        finger://dan@hld.ca         http://www.hld.ca     
Beware of a tall black man with one blond shoe.