IContact
Who leaked my address, and when?
Providing tagged email addresses to vendors is fascinating, and at the same time disturbing. It lets me track what a particular email address is used for, but also to see where and when they’ve leaked to spammers.
I’d really like to know who leaked an email address, and when.
All my inbound mail is sorted into “spam” and “not-spam” by a combination of SpamAssassin, some static sieve rules and a learning spam filter in my mail client. That makes it fairly easy for me to look at my “recent spam”. That’s a huge amount of data, though, something like 40,000 pieces of spam a month.
Finding the needle of interesting data in that haystack is going to take some automation. As I’ve mentioned before you can do quite a lot of useful work with a mix of some little perl scripts and some commandline tools.
I’m interested in the first time a tagged address started receiving spam, so I start off with a perl script that will take a directory full of emails, one per file, find the ones that were sent to a tagged address and print out that address and the time I received the email. I can’t rely on the Date: header, as that’s under the control of the spammer, and often bogus. But I can rely on the timestamp my server adds when it receives the email – and it records that in the first Received: header in the message.
iContact lists compromised
iContact has acknowledged that (some) of their customer lists were compromised and that they are investigating. As iContact has chosen not to allow comments on that post, feel free to share comments here.
HT: @aliverson