This seems so weird to be asking to be spammed.



I've been a regular reader here for a few years. I've asked an occasional
question, and tried to answer a few now and then when I can. I now have a
request that is off topic, but I'm hoping you can help.



I'm one of the email system admins for my company. We're in the process of
implementing an anti-spam system. One of the things we want to do is
experiment and tune the system using "real" spam, without affecting our live
user email system.



What we've done is have our ISP set up a new email domain for us,
"test.cmhmetro.net". This email domain points to our new system. We've
set up an isolated system and created a couple of accounts with those
addresses. What I want to do is all the things you're not supposed to do
with email addresses on the internet; post them in newsgroups, put them on
junk mail lists, use them to answer Nigerian banking emails, etc. The
intent is to start getting real world junk mail through this test
environment.



When we're ready to put the anti-spam software on our production system, we'll
remove the test.cmhmetro.net domain and apply the settings we've learned to
our real system.



I'm asking for help from the readers of alt.home.repair. Use the addresses
of:











and put them on any internet junk email lists you run across..



I want to make it clear, I am not asking for anyone's email address. This
isn't some address harvesting scam..



Mike O.

Mike O. wrote:
This seems so weird to be asking to be spammed.

When we're ready to put the anti-spam software on our production system, we'll
remove the test.cmhmetro.net domain and apply the settings we've learned to
our real system.

I'm asking for help from the readers of alt.home.repair. Use the addresses
of:
[email protected]
[email protected]
and put them on any internet junk email lists you run across..

I want to make it clear, I am not asking for anyone's email address. This
isn't some address harvesting scam..

Mike O.


Wasting your time. Our heaviest spam load comes from the
auto-composers that would much rather harvest your url!
then generate every possible variation of

now all your employees that use tom@myplace, jim@myplace
will get hundreds of spam emails a week since the common
name dictionary is the first @myplace they spit out, and
those boxes you need for new customers like info, order,
web, sales, help, postmaster, abuse, purchasing, on and on
@myplace.

We run spam assasin which black hole's about 1000 spam
emails a week. About 50 questionable emails a week go to a
"spam" box. You can tweek to catch the crap that trys to
get thru with industry specific buzzwords.

but all our best efforts get shot down when an employee
signs up for a weather bug, or find cheap gas, with his
email addy and the TOS he didn't read, says he just agreed
to have his addy published worldwide. then complains he's
getting 50 emails a day for refi, viagra, online degrees.

tighten up on percent of html, if it's all html, it's spam.
bring your system up live with filters in place, route the
fails to a "spam" box. copy the passes (that were
delivered) to an archive box. look at the archive box for
spam, and the spam box for valid emails. look for the
patterns and adjust your filters to make the right decision.

fighting spam is a never ending project, and you'll need to
tweek to keep up with the latest spam patterns designed to
get thru your best filter attempts. after the first month,
it does get easier. I check the spam box every day for any
real email that got trapped and get it safely passed on.
Once a week it takes 15 minutes to look at the rest for
patterns to update my filters. (we have 25 valid email
addys, everything else is returned "not here")

there are good resources online too. good luck!

-larry / dallas


harvesters can take weeks to catch what you just asked us to
do. take one of your test addresses and sign up for every
free thing you see on the net, you'll get lots of spam in a
day or two. also, harvesters don't like subdomains like
@test.myplace.mz, they'll go for the myplace.mz. i hope
c-h-e-r-.n-t is not your real url, you've just committed
-t to the composers. (but your registrar
already did that for you too ;-)

"larry" wrote in message
et...
Mike O. wrote:
This seems so weird to be asking to be spammed.

When we're ready to put the anti-spam software on our production system,
we'll remove the test.cmhmetro.net domain and apply the settings we've
learned to our real system.

I'm asking for help from the readers of alt.home.repair. Use the
addresses of:
[email protected]
[email protected]
and put them on any internet junk email lists you run across..

I want to make it clear, I am not asking for anyone's email address.
This isn't some address harvesting scam..

Mike O.


Wasting your time. Our heaviest spam load comes from the auto-composers
that would much rather harvest your url! then generate every possible
variation of

now all your employees that use tom@myplace, jim@myplace will get hundreds
of spam emails a week since the common name dictionary is the first
@myplace they spit out, and those boxes you need for new customers like
info, order, web, sales, help, postmaster, abuse, purchasing, on and on
@myplace.

We run spam assasin which black hole's about 1000 spam emails a week.
About 50 questionable emails a week go to a "spam" box. You can tweek to
catch the crap that trys to get thru with industry specific buzzwords.

but all our best efforts get shot down when an employee signs up for a
weather bug, or find cheap gas, with his email addy and the TOS he didn't
read, says he just agreed to have his addy published worldwide. then
complains he's getting 50 emails a day for refi, viagra, online degrees.

tighten up on percent of html, if it's all html, it's spam.
bring your system up live with filters in place, route the fails to a
"spam" box. copy the passes (that were delivered) to an archive box.
look at the archive box for spam, and the spam box for valid emails. look
for the patterns and adjust your filters to make the right decision.

fighting spam is a never ending project, and you'll need to tweek to keep
up with the latest spam patterns designed to get thru your best filter
attempts. after the first month, it does get easier. I check the spam
box every day for any real email that got trapped and get it safely passed
on. Once a week it takes 15 minutes to look at the rest for patterns to
update my filters. (we have 25 valid email addys, everything else is
returned "not here")

there are good resources online too. good luck!

-larry / dallas


harvesters can take weeks to catch what you just asked us to do. take one
of your test addresses and sign up for every free thing you see on the
net, you'll get lots of spam in a day or two. also, harvesters don't like
subdomains like @test.myplace.mz, they'll go for the myplace.mz. i hope
c-h-e-r-.n-t is not your real url, you've just committed
-t to the composers. (but your registrar already did
that for you too ;-)

Thanks for the info.

I know trying to catch all the spam completely is never going to happen, but
we get around 70,000 pieces of internet mail incoming daily (for 4000
employees), so just about any filtering would help.

And no, the cmhmetro.net isn't our regular email domain. It is one we've
had registered for years, but we set up and switched our users over to a
completely new one several years ago (partly because of all the junk mail we
were receiving).

I figured the first part of domain would probably get stripped off and I
didn't want to set up a test one that was anything close to our real ones,
but I also didn't want to pick something that might have contained some
other company's address.