Tsaiko ([info]tsaiko) wrote,
@ 2004-04-29 09:06:00
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Current mood: amused

Big dork
There may be a few minute delay between me posting this to LJ and it getting posted to my pitas page. Please be patient.

The birth of the dorkiest GIS project ever at Dance of the Hours

You can help! Opinions and suggestions eagerly wanted.


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[info]maderr
2004-04-29 02:29 pm UTC (link)
1) I would definitely say yahoo gets the most spam. My yahoo account is ridiculous for that - I get hundreds a week. I mean the go into the bulk folder automatically but msn I don't get spammed at all. Yahoo? TONS

2) I think you've got plenty already, if you're looking at name, country, what kind and so forth.

3) A top ten would be awesome! This sounds cool as hell, I can't wait to see how it goes.

4) If you do more than one addy, I'd stop at three. Like I said, my one yahoo address gets well over a hundred a week. I have another address that gets about eighty a week. That's plenty aggravating enough.

5) Sign up for something. Anything. Though if you get it with yahoo you'll start getting spammed in no time.

6) An lj would be fun I think.

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[info]velithya
2004-04-29 02:38 pm UTC (link)
1. Hotmail tends to be pretty bad, I used to get a couple a day (they've started coming a little slower at the moment, hopefully the trend will stay that way). My university email gets at least 5 every day (or so) at the moment, which is quite annoying.

2. The ones you've listed seem fine. Perhaps you should also track the approximate grammar level of each email?

3. yep, sounds fine to me! ^_^

4. I'd say get one on each of the main free email providers, then you can compare which provider gets the most spam (hotmail, yahoo etc).

5. If you really wanted to do it scientifically, you should probably double the number of email addresses you get, so two from each provider you decide to go with, and then post one and not the other, and compare the two. If not, either way should be fine, although I would suggest a mix of each. As to where to post it, I'd say just on the blog somewhere would be fine. If you're going to include the address of the site you posted in the final database, I'd suggest perhaps not the blog. :P Maybe just get an angelfire or geocities account purely for posting of your spam-catcher email addresses.

6. YES!!! ^_^ Absolutely.

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[info]tsaiko
2004-04-30 12:58 am UTC (link)
My own hotmail account varies significantly. As I mentioned in some other comments, I like the public versus private email address idea. I'll probably do that. I'll probably set up a geocities account with a simple webpage at the public email address on it. See what it attracts.

I don't know how I would quantify grammar. Is there a way to quanitfy bad versus good grammar? How about spelling mistakes? I may look into that. Just for the humor value.

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[info]velithya
2004-04-30 07:58 am UTC (link)
*nods* sounds good.

ah... okay, good English as opposed to Engrish or broken English? Sentences that just don't make sense? Stuff like that. Spelling may work, or maybe you can give each email a rating out of 5 or 10 for spelling, grammar and coherancy or something.

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[info]skyknyt
2004-04-29 07:50 pm UTC (link)
If I were you, I'd create an open pop3 account somewhere, and put the email address up on several (lots?) of web pages, and let it accrue spammers. This way nothing is getting filtered out by the "spam protections" that hotmail and yahoo offer.

I don't think a livejournal for that, by itself, would be incredibly interesting... but a running total at the bottom of your LJ posts would be.

"SPAM THUS FAR:
My penis would be 400 inches longer if I bought their products!
700 million offered by Nigeria scams!
1200 college coeds have had fun in my inbox...."

etc.

skye

skye

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[info]tsaiko
2004-04-30 12:49 am UTC (link)
I don't want too many SPAM emails. Keep in mind that this is a personal project I'm going to be doing in my spare time. 100 spam emails a day, or even 25 would simply be too many for me to handle since I have to go through them by hand. At the same time, I don't want to get 1 SPAM email a day. Something between 3-10 will do and I think can be achieved by having the email address on one website.

I'm not sure how to go about setting up or getting a pop3 account. On the other hand, I may set up an experiment to see which gets more SPAM: an account on Hotmail or an account on Yahoo.

And I love the signature idea. ^_^

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[info]nakaithus
2004-04-29 10:30 pm UTC (link)
1.) I really can't help with figuring which e-mail service is the "worst"; the spam levels of my BellSouth address is manageable (though you should have seen the MailGuard folder while I still had it set to kill the messages within once a week instead of once a day!) and my work address gets no spam. Period.

I'd agree with skye but for one thing: I've noticed that a number of spam messages will send to a large chunk of random names to the same domain. My guess is that if you're the only person on the domain, you may not be big enough to attract spam from the more egregious spammers. I could be wrong though...

2.) Using the name would be interesting (and sometimes very funny), but country of origin might be misleading, since it's generally assumed that spammers will spoof another user's email info. Subject line might be a good category, though you might have to do some editing (i.e., the mortgage spam that places your home address in the subject field could be replaced with [ADDRESS] or somesuch)...

3.) Yes!

4.) and 5.) I agree whole-heartedly with Vel's idea. Get a couple of addresses, send one out to the world (popular message boards, websites you already hit frequently, that sort of thing), don't do anything with the other address, and compare the two.

6.) Hell, make a separate small site out of it. That way you can hone your web design skills while the rest of us laugh at the spam.

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[info]tsaiko
2004-04-30 12:56 am UTC (link)
I know for a fact that the spammers are going to be spoofing email addresses like mad. I'm not going to be basing my analysis on IP address (although I would love to compare reported country of origin versus IP country of origin). I'm going to take the country the claim to be from at face value and see what kind of results it gives me.

I also like the Subject line idea. I will think about that.

Vel does have a good idea. I think I will create two email address: one that is posted to a website and one that is not. I'm also contemplating following two hotmail address for six months and two yahoo addresses for six months. It would make for an interesting comparison.

Your website idea is interesting. I've got space on my school account. Hmmm...

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