One executive says the practice of "blind broadcasting" costs his company thousands of dollars per year.
He calls it "blind broadcasting," a practice in which spammers make up random email addresses in hopes of hitting upon a few legitimate ones. And he says it is costing his company thousands of dollars per year.
Brogan and others speculate that people who sell email lists may be padding out their lists with illegitimate addresses in order to make their lists look bigger than they really are.
Others pointed out that some antispammers occasionally use programs such as Wpoison that actually plant phony email names on the Web in order to snare junk emailers. Junk emailers find the phony names when they use software to vacuum up email addresses from the Web.
But the bottom line to him is that he shouldn't have to do that, he said.