Reply to post: Re: Honeytrap?

It's May 2. Know what that means? Yep, it's the PR orgy that is World Password Day... again

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Honeytrap?

"but where did they get the username from?"

I've seen strange ones come into my domains email where the username has come from usenet postings. eg Pan creates a message ID from the word Pan+date+time@domain. Few spammers care about sanitising or otherwise verifying their mailing list. They just care about the numbers of addressees in it, so trawling usenet groups or Google Groups and pulling anything that looks a like an email address from the headers is all they care about. I just put a reject rule in that blocks P|pan.* I've seen other spams arrive where the email address is more like the example you gave, so I assume there are other places, maybe mailing lists, which use some sort of algorithm to generate message IDs from email addresses.

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