One day last week, I had over 30,000 spam emails, many of them with 180K attachments. I remember a Hong Kong spammer claiming I should be happy that so many people are interested in informing me of their products, but I was not happy. For a start, deleting this number of files bogged down our IMAP server.
This flood happened as I was training the spam filters for a new mail reader: I wonder if I have been getting them at this rate for some time? Does everyone get this amount?
Whatever, spamming is stealing so much bandwidth and wasting so many people's time that there clearly needs to be much more policing going on.
Or is email dead, as some claim, and we need to move to P2P and RSS alternatives?
Categories
Web
Comments (3)
Read More Entries by Rick Jelliffe.
Vigilantism is not going to help
Sorry, that was meant to be a reply to jwenting's reply, not to the blog post.
Vigilantism is not going to help
How do you distinguish a real spammer from a joe job where someone spammed in your name? How do you know you are striking back at the correct party? Please take a moment to think your stance through more thoroughly next time.
30000
not seen that much yet, but during the height of the trojans last year I did get as many as 10 per minute for about a week.
I ended up installing a rule that rejected all mail over 140KB, there was no other way to stem the tide.
This way at least the connection from my ISP to me wasn't swamped.
After about 3 weeks the volume had abated to the current average of about one every 5 minutes (virus emails only...) and a similar volume of spam.
Mind this is for a single account, not an entire domain!
Email may be dead, but rest assured that when and if we abandon it for something else it will be a matter of days before the spammers and virus authors seek out and destroy that medium as well.
As long as international law is such that it's illegal for the victim to defend himself actively against these intruders in our digital homes by sending retaliatory strikes to take them down I fear there is no hiding from the criminals and their hijacked robots.