Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Spam for Christmas Eve

Posted by Roo - 24/12/07 at 01:12:11 am

A tip: if you manage a domain (example.org, say) don’t set up your email forwarders to forward everything@example.org to your email address. It might seem clever (“oh, this way even if someone typos an address, I’ll still get it”) but If you set things up this way and someone decides to send thousands of spam emails, spoofing the address(es) to be anything@example.org, you’ll get all the bounced email. That will be annoying. Eventually, the people hosting the server which is handling all this bounced spam will probably do something about it, and that will be annoying too.

Today, I have been sent over 7054 emails (and, despite having removed the forwarder, the number is still increasing). Some of these unwanted emails are out of office notifications. There are a lot of those at this time of year. Many are warnings that the destination mailbox is full (of spam, no doubt) or doesn’t exist. Many more are notifications that my spam is not going to be delivered because it’s spam. I didn’t send it, of course, it just appears to the recipient that I did, so of course I get the notifications.

I deserve all of this, for setting up a stupid auto-forwarder that would forward everything to me. I’ve learned. Learn from me.