Great!
That could explain a lot.
O.K. I hope that cleans up.
Perhaps a different IP block. Also, did you get an actual bounce from the previous? If not, was it just a disappearing into the bit bucket of your e-mail (e.g. no indication of *anything* happening?
[ ... ]Agreed.
Yep.
And it is not just the scumbags, but also those made victim by a virus infection. The infection installs a backdoor, which a scumbag somewhere else use to turn that victim's machine into a spam engine, until the victim runs a virus scan because the machine seems so slow whenever it is connected to the net.
[ ... ]Yes -- it all depends on how desperate you are to get the information.
The bad ones already *know* about free hotmail accounts. And I think that hotmail does a good job of blocking sending of e-mails direct from/to port 25 on client machines, so the spam software is forced to go through hotmail's own mail servers, which can (and probably do, by now) filter for virii and spam.
Apparently, at least one of the large ISPs in the US has
*finally* started blocking port-25 traffic from DSL accounts. It has to now go to their mail server via PPP (which is purely a client-to-mail-server protocol, and can't be used to bypass the ISP's mail server and push spam (or virii) out without any controls.Only business accounts have direct port 25 access, now, on those ISPs, and those who use that for spam can be detected and shut down.
Best of luck, DoN.