Spammers' registration with email that ends with "mail.com", just wonder why????

[damenchoy]

I have been running my ezine for many years. And for the past few years, I have been bombarded with spammers who register my newsletter using names like Tom, Peter, Mary with email addresses like maggy@mail.com, albert@mail.com. Those registrations will never get confirmation (I use a double opt-in system).

I have to clean up my email database every month for this annoying spamming registrations but I have no idea why the spammers do this. Does this do any goodness to them? Why do they register my newsletter using these email addresses?

I am curious so I put this up for discussion.

Any clue/idea?

Damen

[Dan C. Rinnert]

My guess is that they are using bots to find sites with signups to look for exploits.

They may be looking for forums they can spam. They may be looking for sites that use eMail scripts to look for vulnerabilities so they can exploit the site or server to send spam. Etc.

The bottom line is that they may not be looking for your newsletter at all. The bots see a registration form, and they hit it.

[JayXtreme]

You will usually find that they are using the free email service here at mail.com:

Free Email Account, 3GB Storage, Spam and Virus Protection at Mail.com

Deliverability to these mailboxes is VERY poor across all autoresponder services

Peace

Jay

[damenchoy]

Actually I have a theory in mind. I am thinking if they try to make use of my newsletter's sending out of subscription emails to their designated public email addresses like Maggy@mail.com to confuse the email service host whether these are legitimate emails or spams. If they keep on registering in my newsletter subscription box, my email server will keep on sending welcome emails to those addresses requesting confirmation.

This could make the big email holders like mail.com, or some others like yahoo.com or gmail.com to have a hard time distinguish spams from normal emails, thus making their spam filtering hit rate drop.

I also worry if that has been done too much, my mail server may be blacklisted.

But this is just my wild guess....

Damen

Originally Posted by JayXtreme

You will usually find that they are using the free email service here at mail.com:

Free Email Account, 3GB Storage, Spam and Virus Protection at Mail.com

Deliverability to these mailboxes is VERY poor across all autoresponder services

Peace

Jay

[newebie]

Originally Posted by damenchoy

I also worry if that has been done too much, my mail server may be blacklisted.

It is an interesting theory and if I were you I also should worried about this. I also have a lot of spam registrations at my site but I did get such mails. I will check it.

Thanks