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

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

It isn't really new. Backscatter spam has been going on for years, and was the bane of my existence back when I worked for a webhosting ISP and had to explain to people why they were getting it.

They seem to have started doing a lot more of it than usual over the last few weeks, though. So, in the end, I've just had to start feeding it all to spamassassin.

There are some damned persistent spams these days. I funnel all my email through first spamassassin on Eyrie, then bounce what survives to Gmail, and still the odd spam occasionally finds its way through.