Spam email CD contents analyzed

A fascinating analysis of the contents of a "millions of email addresses" CDROM acquired via a spam-advertisement:

You can find a number of addresses you don't want to send spam to. The spammer didn't even remove the abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses, 175 and 561 respectively. Both of them have doubles themselves. These role accounts include respectable providers that have a widely known anti-spam policy: the abuse desk of XS4ALL appears 5 times, the abuse desk of Planet three times and their postmasters will receive the spam three times each.

Role accounts not only encompass abuse desks or Network Operation Centers, but also operational accounts like 'hostmaster' and 'postmaster', who have to deal with requests from customers and feedback from key institutions like ARIN and RIPE or domain registrars. Spamming those accounts has several drawbacks for a spammer, their spam is most definitely not wanted by the recipient. It isn't too farfetched to state that online businesses (that mostly have to rely on e-mail for direct customer contact) might be facing increasing difficulties coping with the loss incurred by spam, both technically and financially.

Link (via /.)