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Spam Wave

23:42 Fri 25 Jul 2008. Updated: 18:07 28 Jan 2009
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I still haven’t moved my web and mail servers/services to their new home, and today I was punished for my fragile mail situation: spammers used my domain in their fake from addresses, resulting in several thousand emails of spam backwash (i.e. all the rejected/bounced back messages from the spam) arriving in my inbox.

I was already having some trouble with my mail, as my server has problems running its IMAP server, so I’d been using mutt as my client, and I’m just not as fast or as likely to reply with mail using mutt rather than Thunderbird. In general I’d been avoiding email anyway because I knew I needed to deal with the technical side of my mail, and just haven’t had time to do that recently. Now, it’s worse, requiring more cleanup due to the spam issue.

It’s not that difficult to deal with in technical terms, a little procmail magic would probably handle it, but it’s really damn annoying. I can’t quite regard it as a purely neutral phenomenon, like the weather—even though that’s the best way to look at something like this, which is more or less statistically guaranteed to come around to every domain owner once in a while. I still view it as somewhat personal, and am rather angry at the filthy spammer who chose my domain. While it’s hard to morally defend what they’re doing, the fact is that I can’t influence it at all, and so should regard it in emotionally neutral terms where possible, and should also do my best to prepare for it technically.

I’m not sure it comforts me any to note that the wave of spam, on top of being an annoyance, also helps illustrate the gap between where my attitude should be and where it is…

One Response to “Spam Wave”

  1. Niall Says:

    They undoubtedly didn’t choose your domain – some function of the digits of pi and an entropy collector did… if that makes you feel any better :-)

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