Comcast selling out to spammers?

[dh]

Recently I started a new @comcast.net account for my daughter. She was then away for the next week or so, but is back now and logged into the account for the first time.

Great, a brand new, never used account already had six spam messages, 4 for increasing the size of male organs and two from porn sites. Being 10 years old she is obviously very interested in this stuff. We already had to abandon her HotMail account because of all the crap in it.

I had always liked the Comcast service, but I guess they really are just scummy like all the rest. :bad-words:

[Kati Compton]

It may not be Comcast, but rather a dictionary spam attack on comcast accounts, or the name you chose used to be used by someone else...

[JustinGTP]

When spammers spam, they pick a letter and go for it. Like Jdhayward, JHayward, and everything else to do with that, then they add @hotmail.com to the end of it, and boom, you have spam. This happens to me in some of my spam emails.

-Justin.

[PetiteFlower]

Yeah if you picked her an easy to guess name, she's toast. I get no spam at my comcast account after 6 months.

[Dave Beauvais]

I was helping a neighbor do a self-install of their new cable modem last week and part of it was setting up one of the five provided e-mail accounts. He decided to go with his initials and literally within five minutes had six spams. By the next day he'd accumulated over fifty spams. I logged into his account management page, deleted that user and created a new e-mail address with more letters and one number. So far he's gotten only one spam at that address.

I told him as we were setting it up that he would get spam and there was little that could be done to stop it. It may take a week or a month, but it will happen. I've been doing this for a long time and even I was stunned at how quickly his inbox was flooded with that crap.

The moral of the story is to make your e-mail address as complex as practical. Simply adding a single number, hyphen, or some other non-alpha character will foil most dictionary attacks.

--Dave

[PetiteFlower]

The underscore seems to be the magic character for me :)