20 Aug 2003 garym   » (Master)

Attack of the Rubber Spam

I'm under attack, and this following yesterday when my webhost was under their worst ever attack which makes me wonder if the two might be related, but whatever, this is an attack for which I really don't see any solution: Someone sent out a large virus using all of my website email contact address as the Reply-To and now thousands of well-meaning webservers are 'returning' the email because of full mailboxes, because a virus was detected or just because it's spam.

And what can I do but receive them all? All are from legitimate domains, all of them are from hosts that resolve, all of them are simply replying to that reply header. There's no defense I can see and if someone has one, do let us know.

But what really amazes me is the dense stupidity of these mail servers doing the rubber spam bouncing: If the message contains a virus, why return the virus to the sender?? ... I mean, really, that's pretty smart on their part. For the others, the full mail boxes should probably return the whole message (those that don't still do annoy me because I most often forget to CC: myself) and the anti-spam bots, well there again, when we all know that spam almost never comes from who it says it comes from, why bounce it? ... bouncing spam is, like, so nineties.

Whatever, it seems I'm stuck with it, and since the trees have overgrown the wireless tower plunging me back to rural dialup rates, it means that ever time we go online, the pipe is jammed with the same virus over and over and over and

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