h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't had the mortgage spam yet. And yes, gmail has a great spam filter No spams have made it through to my inbox, but a mailing list I'm on often triggers false positives.

Yeah same here.

I wonder if spam or viruses can get at an address book in web based mail? If we're all getting the same spam, maybe one of us opened a spam mail some time ago, and now it's doing the rounds. Mine are all sent by different people btw - no doubt people who haven't been good netizens and done everything you should to avoid spammers hijacking your PC, or who simply don't know that their PC *can* be hijacked by spammers

I just received my first instance of the m0rtgage spam... is there anything you want to tell us Mikey?

I'm getting quite a bit to the gmail account that is in my real name. The header lines go something along the line of "RealName yadda yadda yadda".

In fact the Gmail account I set up for my step father is getting spam, and that one hasn't been released anywhere, and has never ever been used in the three months that it has been in existence

I'm also getting spam for addresses that bear only a striking similarity to my own How come spam can be misdelivered, but not real email?

I'm under the impression that spam is sent out in batches, often grouped alphabetically by email address. The spammers have to limit how many addresses they include at once, otherwise most ISPs will detect that it is spam. And more often than not, only the first email address in that list shows up in the "to", the rest are blind CC'd.