Bleh, spammers.

[dvandom]

The latest spammer trick is forged reply-to on stuff that's going out to unconfirmed addresses, so that if there's no one reading the email at the first address, the bounce message spams some other guy. In 8 hours overnight, I got 450 such spams that made it through my filters, another 50 caught by SpamAssassin, and a few hundred caught by the content-checking manual filters I set up when this bounce-spam first started (most of it is for sex videos and fake designer watches).

Unfortunately, last night's flood means I now have to subject-filter on bounce messages in general, since they've broadened their content too much for me to keep up that way. So now I can no longer see if I actually send an email that bounces...well, I could, but it would require reading my spam folders so often that it wouldn't be worth HAVING spam filters.

Congratulations, anonymous assholes, for contributing further to turning a useful tool into useless crap.

Comments

Re: It even predates email

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, just like the Nigerian Spam Scam goes back to the early days of the postal service. A story in one of the Grantville Gazette installments revolved around some high school kids adapting that one to 1600s Germany. :)

Unfortunately, I kinda want strangers to be able to contact me out of the blue on the account that's getting all the spam, for various reasons, so I'm reluctant to over-filter or abandon the address.

Re: It even predates email

[lord-xiphos.livejournal.com]

Re: overfiltering - Yep. Unfortunately, even though a solution exists, its successful implementation requires effort on the part of John Q. Public, and that will never happen.