Hello, On Sat, Jul 08, 2017 at 07:50:38PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote: > These messages are the spam, themselves. The pretend "leave me > alone" prologue is just to disguise that status and attract your > attention until you read the quoted text.
I think it is far more likely that these people are responding to spam that has been sent to them with the list's address as the from address. The recipients do not know or care that the from address of an email is not trustworthy¹, nor that they should not respond to spam, so they just reply to express their anger. I further hypothesise that this is not actually targeted behaviour to inconvenience the mailing list specifically. I suspect that massive lists of real email addresses have been harvested from public mailing list archives and compromised address books etc and these are used as from addresses on a random basis. Though it would have to be one address per spam run rather than a different address for each individual email, as these seem to come in bursts. The spammers' motivation is to use an address that is not associated with them but is a real address so cannot be easily blocked on the basis of from address alone. I don't think they care who receives the blowback. Cheers, Andy ¹ barring any of the other trusted identity schemes like SPF, DKIM, DMARC or crypto signed email. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. — John Levine
