Spam Resource: Beware the Email Bomb

Al Iverson just published a brilliant article on Spam Resource:

I had a customer ask me yesterday, why is their ESP trying to force them to implement CAPTCHA on their signup forms? They’re not spammers.Well, unfortunately, it’s usually because of stuff like this: As Webbula’s Jenna Devinney explains, bad guys can easily find and script a bunch of pokes at a bunch of webforms, purely to wreak havoc. Maybe it’s random. Maybe it is to annoy somebody they’re mad at. But the net is, they go around signing up Joe Email User for 200 email lists and then Joe Email User starts receiving 200 emails a day that are all spam to him, and it makes him mad. It makes him hate the companies sending that mail, even though it wasn’t really their fault. It makes him report all that mail as spam, and that’ll harm the sender’s IP and domain reputation.Even worse, the bad guys sometimes script submissions to…

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