spam is like Syphilis, you don't know who gave it too you, it is rather annoying and it's a pain in the ass to get it completely gone.
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spam is like Syphilis, you don't know who gave it too you, it is rather annoying and it's a pain in the ass to get it completely gone.
I'm quite certain that spammers are "brute forcing" spam to Hotmail accounts, meaning that they send spam to every single letter/number/character combination that ends with @hotmail.com. I once studied the headers of one spam message I got there, it had like 50 addresses that were almost the same, only some chars added/changed... I abandoned that account of mine now, I'll never get a hotmail account again...
Edit/Add: Check this out: http://www.spamlaws.com/ All the laws related to spam, from Europe & US & other countries.
Unfortunately, I don't think that kind of brute forcing is confined to Hotmail. I have a DSL account with a very large, well-known ISP, and I've seen several of these headers get caught in my spam folder lately. Pretty soon, only the small mom-and-pop ISPs will be able to slip under the spammers' radar.
The bandwidth toll from that practice must be staggering.