RE: Yahoo (How beaconing works)-how spammers get addresses

I was doing some reading on how spammers work and came
across an explanation. It's more of a shotgun approach
rather than harvesting by bots. Basically what they do
is extrapolate account names and send out literally
thousands of e-mails. The ones that don't bounce back
are valid. (Though in the case of Yahoo, a bot could
easily cruise their member directory, scoop up the
handles and tack on (at)yahoo.com.) 

-Alex
your friendly local luker :)

--- hwg-techniques-digest
<owner-hwg-techniques-digest(at)mail.hwg.org> wrote:
I have also seen spam mail that came to me with all
the addresses being to my ISP, as though a script was
making random addresses by scrambling letters. For
example, taking my name as an example, and yahoo for
the ISP (just an example), there was mail for
lob(at)yahoo.com, lon(at)yahoo.com, lonn(at)yahoo.com,
loan(at)yahoo.com, lona(at)yahoo.com, lonna(at)yahoo.com, etc. 

These are only examples.  Someone using various letter
combinations to find addresses at a particular ISP. 
Some will probably bounce back, but some might hit the
mark. Does anyone know about this kind of email
address harvesting?

Lonna

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