Python spam?

[Tim Peters]

[Aahz]
>>> Anyone else getting "Python-related" spam?  So far, I've seen messages
>>> "from" Barry Warsaw and Skip Montanaro (although of course header
>>> analysis proves they didn't send it).

[Thomas Heller]
>> I'm getting spam not only from Barry, but also from myself ;-) with
>> forged headers.  But I'm not sure what you mean with Python-related...
>> Not the contents, IIRC.

[Aahz[
> Thing is, I don't usually get spam "from" people I know (or at least it
> gets filtered before I see it), so someone is clearly using some resource
> of Python-related email addresses.  Just seems rather odd, and I wonder
> whether it's some kind of DoS attack or what.

It's been going on for years.  The most frequent forged "Python
related" sender address I've seen is actually help at python.org,
followed (but not closely) by /F's fredrik at pythonware.com.  Spammers
harvest legit addresses to forge via scraping web pages and via
Trojans scouring newbies' address books.  The latter probably accounts
for the very high rate of help at python.org forgeries.  Via the former,
anyone with a "public" email address can expect to see it get forged
sooner or later.

About two years ago I sent a polite email to a porn vendor asking them
to please stop forging one of my email addresses as the sender of
their spam.  They didn't reply, but within a few days I stopped
receiving porn spam claiming to come from me.  Frankly, I miss it :-)