Spam Storm

[kevin_standlee]

A couple of days ago, my e-mail account was deluged with spam. Much of it was being caught by the filters, but there was a lot more of it than usual. I was getting more spam in an hour than I usually get in a week. Just dumping the spam filter was getting time consuming, and not all of the messages were getting caught in the filter. Examining a few of them, I found that they were all pretty much the same spam item, all being sent to [various random names]@conjose.org. I have been the default address for [anything not otherwise defined]@conjose.org for a while now, so I was getting every one of those messages.

In order to turn off the tap, I had to go and change the default mail handling so that mail to anything but one of a fairly small number of defined mail aliases@conjose.org is discarded without reading. This means, by the way, that nearly every e-mail alias on the con's web site is now defunct, as I haven't had time to go through and create mail alias "recipies" for them. Not that many of them were being used; I think we may have had one or two more or less real messages in the past year or so.

Comments

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

That's the same thing that made me kill the @confurence.net email addresses a couple years ago.

[smarier.livejournal.com]

In the last few weeks the @norwescon.org address have almost tripled the amount of SPAM received. In one hour I received almost 300 pieces. I'm grateful I have a well trained spam filter. I can no longer spend the time to verify that everything which is marked as spam actually is.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

I had to do this for the torcon addresses months ago. That was for the legitimate addresses; I never accepted stuff for any email address.

I've seen the dictionary attacks on my mail server log. Most of that gets caught upstream now.