Spam

Buried somewhere is the draft of something I started writing last week but never finished. I may finish and post it, or I may not and eventually just hit DELETE. It was one of those rambling, babbling things I do when my mind is going in 4,870,365 different directions all at once, and I try to give it (my thoughts) direction by pounding keys.

What was I doing that got me that way? I was helping Herself, Da Kid's fiancé, set up her first ever, brand new PC. She's never had a new one before or one at home that connects to the Internet.

Her old tried and true one that she inherited years ago from an older sister, who had inherited it from someone else years before that, no longer fit her needs. It couldn't handle the volumes of information that a nursing student is apparently expected to access via the CDs the teachers distribute. And, the teachers and the school email stuff to the students on a routine basis, which she could only get by going to student lab at school to use one of the PCs there.

Da Kid set it all up. My job was to explain stuff because, "Mom, you know all about 'that stuff'."

No I don't, as many of you know. I do know more than Herself does, because she knew nothing. Zip. Nada. Which, of course, makes me look like I do know a lot.

Anyway, I was reading something Attaboy blogged, and realized I'd forgotten to warn Herself about spams that say, "Click here to be removed from our mailing list."

Wait.

Talk about rambling and babbling, where was I going with this . . . oh, yeah.

. . . it appears that mail spammers are using a new trick to not only get responses to the crap they send out, but to keep themselves hidden from the law as well. According to this story, spammers will send tons of e-mail out from a domain that doesn’t exist. A few hours after sending the mail out, they will register the domain and set up a server to accept return responses to the mail they sent out the night or day before. Once they’ve received responses, they shut the domains down so anti-spam investigators can’t find them, thereby avoiding many of the new laws created to prosecute them.

Read more here.