How do I know you're spamming?

There are a number of reasons I know that mail coming into my mailbox is spam.

  1. I get 15 copies. There are a lot of spammers out there who buy and scrape addresses and don’t do even the simplest of de-duping. Send multiple copies to a single address, you’re probably spamming.
  2. I get mail to a non-tagged address. I use tags for every signup, and have done since mid-1999 or so. If I get commercial email to a non-tagged address, I know it’s spam.
  3. I get to a tagged address from someone it wasn’t given to. As above, the tags remind me who was given my email address. If mail comes into a tagged address and it wasn’t given to the sender, then I know the mail is spam.
  4. I get mail to a poorly harvested address. Another subset of the tagged addresses, there are a couple badly written web harvesters out there which add random characters onto the end of my tags. So I get mail to -infon@ and -infonn@ and -infonnn@ addresses, and I know the sender is spamming.
  5. Someone attempts to send mail to an address that never existed at my domain. Even better, I don’t have to receive the mail for this one. If you attempt to send mail to a non-existent user here, I know without even looking that the mail was not asked for.

Am I wrong?

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On the minus side, yet another ruling against tagged.com. They’ve been accused of sending spam, including some mail that looks like a phish. They recently settled in a CA court, agreeing to dispose of certain addresses collected during a 3 month period in 2009.

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No one harvests email addresses any more

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We have a rotating set of email addresses on our contact page. Every day we push out a new email address. Every day we expire addresses that were pushed out 7 days ago.
I can say, with 100% certainty, that there are people harvesting addresses off websites. The ads are reasonably “targeted.” Most of them are offering increased traffic, or the ability to monetize the website. Some are offering work from home.
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Targeted spam is still spam. And having a rotating, expiring contact address has kept the amount of spam coming into our contact address low enough that the contact address is actually useable. 10 spams a month (for a 7 day old email address) is much more manageable than 1000 emails a month (for a 4 year old email address).

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