I stupidly posted my e mail address one time to a New York Times forum (& it was removed within 24 hrs.). The address was harvested by spammers. Within a day, I was getting 200 daily delivery failure e mail notices from various domains saying that e mails sent from my address were aborted before delivery to other parties because they contained viruses, etc. Not to mention the 10 or so counterfeit Microsoft security e mail notices I receive each day.
Which brings me to my possibly very naive question: shouldn’t there be an easy way to verify the authenticity of an e mail address that is used to send an e mail? Perhaps you could link the e mail address to the IP (yes, I know many have dynamic IP addresses). So, even if IP linking isn’t the answer, isn’t there some way to link an address to something of mine (PC, IP, whatever) that can’t be traced or appropriated by the spammer?
Can anyone tell me whether this issue is being addressed by anyone in the industry? Shouldn’t ISPs themselves care about this issue since their customers’ addresses (which they distribute) are being ‘stolen?’
In response to the above question, a Dell Forum member provided this interesting link to a Center for Democracy & Technology study of e mail spam, its origins and ways to stop it.
