On 06/09/05, Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> wrote:
If my grandmother has a "reputation" for sending legitimate email, and she inadvertently installs some spam zombie software, it is certainly feasible (and probably trivial) for the spammer to steal all her credentials and thus her "reputation". Spam will get out for a while, but once her "reputation" significantly degrades, it will be stopped -- as will any future legitimate email from her.
Anyone who has been paying much attention to the spam problem in the past few years already knows that assigning a bad reputation forever is a bad idea -- especially to dialups. What's more likely to happen in your Grandmother's case is that her IP/e-mail address will have a bad reputation for a while, and then she'll call you and you'll come over and un-zombify her cmoputer and say "okay, Grandma, remember what we said about clicking on links on porn sites?" and she'll say "oh, but it was blinking such pretty colors!" and a few hours/days later the reputation will have returned to the default state. -- J.D. Falk blong! you are a pickle! <jdfalk@cybernothing.org>