Those crazy spammers

It’s amazing how clever those spammers are.

On Oct. 30, 2006, I set up a new mailbox on one of the domains that I manage. It’s a hosted domain held by a major ISP. I just set up the mailbox, but didn’t do anything with it. It’s never sent a message, not even a test message. The address has never been given out. The address was an obscure one; it wasn’t something like info@ or service@.

Today, for the first time, I logged in to the Web-based interface, and found 58 pieces of spam in the inbox.

How do they do it? Brute force? Have spammers hacked into the ISP’s back-end systems? Is there someone on the inside? Absolutely incredible.