Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then? (1 Viewer)

mjp

Founding member
I have a "catch-all" email box set up at my smog.net domain. What that means is if someone sends email to some address that doesn't exist @smog.net, the server doesn't bounce it, it accepts it and sticks it in the catch-all. I don't actually go through those, I just use it as a curiosity, to gauge how much spam the domain gets.

I hadn't checked the box recently, so I was a bit surprised when I peeked in there today. Turns out I'm getting 25,000 spam messages every day. That's roughly one every 3 seconds, three quarters of a million a month, or 9 million a year. Which is an impressive 36 gigabytes of spam a year.

On one domain.

Granted, it's an old domain, and the older they are, the more spam they accumulate. But damn. It gives you some idea of just how much spam is bouncing around out there...there have to be 10's of millions of crap messages being sent every second.

Just thought I'd share that, for no reason in particular.
 
or is that too much information?

i own three domains.
funny. i was homeless, but i had three homes on the innerweb.

anyway, that's about right.

i just don't think my penis can stand getting any bigger,
or stay any harder so "the women" won't stare.

unless i needed to wear a Rolex on it,
or get stock tips from it.

so, it's like that, i guess.
 
and all because one moron in 10 million actually responds to spam email.

...though I did hear that those stock tip emails actually work for the scammer.
 
...though I did hear that those stock tip emails actually work for the scammer.
It's called "pump and dump," and like anything else, it was very effective when it was a new scheme. Less effective now.

But yes, spam exists because people respond to it. There's an interesting book called The Spam Kings, that describes the whole process. Though the book is a few years old, so it's almost quaintly antiquated in its profile of the lone spammer staying one step ahead of the law. Most spam now is sent by botnets of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of compromised home and business computers, and they are run primarily out of Eastern Europe.
 
have you experienced the weird thing where you get literally hundreds of auto
responses because some jerk wad spammer has used your domain as a return
address to spam, and your domain becomes blacklisted?

that happened, and i couldn't figure out why my web host wasn't answering my
emails. my domain, hosted by them, had become blacklisted because of the
amount of spam with return addresses, forged, pointing to my domain, and they
literally never got my emails because of spam filters.

spammers are weird.
 
YEah,
I woke up one morning to 4500 new e-mails. And those were only the nes that did not get through. They were the ones from servers telling me that the addresses were no good.

mjp,
I have likely been blacklisted because of this? Is ther any way to check this?

Thanks,
BIll
 
in my case it was because my actual host was barraged with what
amounted to spam, so they just filtered my domain.

they were very apologetic, and said they couldn't understand
how it happened, etc. but i knew why i was filtered, a.k.a. black-listed.

so, i think it was a personal thing in my case, Bill. I've looked at the
statistics, and been to SpamCop to look at the domains, and I'm a geek,
and I love this shit, but I can't make any heads or tails of it either.
 
I have likely been blacklisted because of this? Is ther any way to check this?
Well, the best way to tell is if someone says, "Hey, I sent you this email and it bounced." Then you can look at the bounce message they received and (usually) see exactly what happened.

The important thing to remember is blacklists do not list domains, they list IP addresses of servers. So your domain doesn't actually get blacklisted, the server does.

You can see the main problem here is if you don't run your own server, you're at the mercy of the thousands of other domains that your ISP sends mail for. One sender out of 10,000 can get the server blocked. It's a never-ending problem.

If you know the hostname for your mail server (something like mail.whatever.com) you can lookup the IP and run it through spamcop and spamhaus to see if it's listed (or you can plug your email address into this and most of the time get the IP of the mail server). But only the IP owner can get the IP delisted.

These blacklist places, by the way, are absolutely useless in preventing spam. But everyone still uses them, so what are you going to do. The best thing we've found for getting rid of 90% of your spam is a little something called greylisting. But this post is already long boring enough without getting into that.
 
Extraordinary rendition for the spammers and mugwumps that screw around on the net. Waterboarding behind the outhouse...in August.

-Bastards
 
Yeah but sometimes the random text they write on the spam can be pretty funny... I don't have an example right now, but I know of some guys who started making animations in Flash where the characters lines are taken from spam messages. You know, the kind that reads like cut and paste from 10 different stories in one paragraph.

The animations with that kind of disembodied random dialogue gets pretty post modernist, I'll tell ya.
 

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