X-no-Archive:yes
Since these are presumably being culled by a spider from a web source or
comp.sys.hp.mpe, we can make a few other guesses. The spiders probably look
for anything containing @. On our list, there is always some chance of
getting false hits. So the spider would parse up what is contiguous to the
@, between new lines and white spaces. If no expected third level element is
found (such as the .com, .net, .edu and others that have been mentioned),
discard it.

There have been various attempts to foil spiders, but apparently their
owners care very little about how much garbage they accumulate in their
lists, although some of those who sell these lists purport them to be
"cleansed", at least according to some of the spam I get offering to sell me
such lists. It does seem reasonable to believe that very simple attempts to
foil them by spelling out one's email in the body (gregory dot stigers at
cgiusa dot com) or adding extra words to one's SMTP in the headers
([log in to unmask]) DO work, although
either are a pain for anyone who would just hit reply. I would be
interesting in hearing what other listmembers have found effective in trying
to reduce spam.

Today, I received only three spam, whereas last weekend, between the time I
left and the time I came in Monday morning, I received fifteen. I've
resorted to having Outlook redirect mail whose headers contain IP address
classes and domain names that I've seen in other spam, as well as calling
any toll free numbers in any spam I get, just to ask why I got the spam (I
get hung up on, a lot; I never get a satisfactory answer, only the
satisfaction of becoming dead weight on someone's margins).

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com