Thursday, 15 September 2005

Oh dear: false positives ahoy!

So the good people behind Mailinator (the disposable email address folks) decided to put up a Google Maps thingy that shows where spam has come from recently. Unfortunately, it only served to illustrate the false positive problem...

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4 comments:

GoodBytes said...

Richi, how do you know that there are false positives? I mean, how can one tell?

Richi Jennings said...

OK, so I didn't give much detail. Basically, Mailinator's map was saying that Apple is a spammer. "New Music Tuesday" is a legitimate email newsletter that one has to sign up for.

GoodBytes said...

Thanks for the explanation. Well, I guess they treated that specific mail as spam because it was probably sent to many recipients.

Anyway, I love the Mailinator's idea - putting the spammers on the map! Thumbs up.

Richi Jennings said...

Come again? Apple is launching a denial of service attack on Mailinator? Sounds unlikely. More likely is people signed up for a legitimate newsletter with a one-shot email address. Hardly fair on Apple.

Word to the wise: if you want to download iTunes, you don't have to give any email address.

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