Spam mail.. how did they do it?

The generating of spam mail can be done internally or from an outside source,it is the same as junk mail.It can be started by signing up for publications,partipating in surveys,some advertisement will sell your email address,any thing that is applied for over the net and you can get a person's email address.
Depending on your ISP provider you can report some spammers,using a third party software.I am not sure of any clear cut way of clearing out spam.

Spam mailers just get email addresses at random and send you mail.
This depends on who you use for email.
Hotmail have a protection box where mail sent to you that you don't wanht goes into and you just then empty it.
The other option would be toadd your filter and block the address or the whole of that domain.

Actually they are answering your question. Your e-mail address is sold as part of a list to other parties when you give it out to web sites and such. The spammers just have bulk mailers that e-mail to everyone on those lists or to certain parties byusing filters. It really isn't any more complicated than that.

There are also other tricks they use to mask their source and to send mail via a different domain than their own to cover their tracks.

If your filters are not doing the trick, your only other option would be to buy some sort of blocking software. Those use much better filtering techniques than the ones built into the typical e-mail programs.

Nobody wants to give up an e-mail account, but if your problem is as bad as you say, that may end up being your only good option.

A few tips:

1. If you use AOL, live with it. They are notorious for being the best source of e-mail addresses for spammers. There isn't much you can do about it except dump them (I would anyway).

2. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER give out your primary e-mail address to web sites or anyone else who is not a friend or associate. Create a free hotmail account for that and let it collect all that spam. Go there and just purge it every couple of weeks sothey don't deactivate your account though. This may not eliminate all of it, but it drastically reduces the problem. Of course, this only works well on a new account. You'll continue to get spam for a long time on an existing account that is alreadywell known out there on the mailing lists. Nothing much you can do about that.

3. Never ever respond to a spam e-mail even if they are offering to take you off their mailing list. This just tells the spammer he has hit a valid address and guarantees that you will get more spam. They have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in removing you from their list. Quite the opposite. It's just a ploy to get you to respond.

Spam mail can be created by logging into
a SMTP server that is open for relaying.
Using a bulk mailer, you can send
thousands of mails, seemingly coming
from a legitimate domain (Such as
whitehouse.gov) That way, it's almost
impossible to trace, unless you start
analysing IP adresses. (Because in 99%
of the cases they will leave an IP trace,
which again can be traced to their ISP.)
However, this is again pretty useless, as
any spammer with respect for himself
would use some clueless free ISP, which
doesn't actually authenticate the ID of it's
users. You will need to know the SMTP
syntaxes to do this. (Easy to set up a shell
script in Unix to do this to a known weak
mail server.) I had for a couple of daysthousands of e-mails coming in through
my e-mail server, to be relayed on - Until I
noticed, and shut of relaying. Best thing
you can do is to notify InterNic about
which IP's the spam is coming from -
They are principally in a position toforce
sysadmins to shut of relaying on their
servers - And when this is done, you're
safe.

It is impossible to clean up an e-mail
account in the way I suspect you mean. If
your e-mail is out there, you can't
un-publish it. Only solution is to use mail
blocking software, to pick up big bcc
fields, or to pick up common phrases.

Hope this helps.

We run a unix email server and discovered we too were being used as a relay for spammers. When we did a log check we discovered applications that ran hidden on our srvr. There were two suspect tcp/ip variants:ETRN and SMTPD that were associated withthis infiltration.We could trace where the email relay requests came from but they were a legitimate Company no doubt used as an intermediate relay site.We set up the srvr to only let remote users get POP mail but not relay.This stopped them but ourlog show many requests for the relay and the ETRN protocol is definitely associated. My question is where is there info on this process and has anyone done research on how this works,and how can we trasce these things to catch the little buggers?

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