I’m conducting an experiment. I’m going to throw an email address out there, sparchive@valuableonline.info, and see how long it takes for spiders to pick it up and start spamming it. The email will be funnelled into an auto-posting blog, allowing for it to be easily searchable and reported on. To further the fun, perhaps even comments will be allowed to be posted unmoderated, which will let us analyze multiple spam vectors.

Why do this, you might ask? Simply put, I’ve been exceptionally careful with my email addresses. Using a service like Sneakemail religiously, I have absolutely no sense of what most folks go through with spam. I get maybe one or two a week. With Sneakemail, as soon as an address is compromised (ie, starts being spammed), you turn it off or apply filters or grey-listing (which causes the first transmission to bounce, but if the sender is a real relay, they will try again). Now, I’ll actually have an understanding of what people are actually going through dealing with spam.