All That Spam, And No One Home
Posted on December 30, 2006
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 55 views |
Lately some spammer has been putting this domain - postal-code.com - into the From: header of their spam emails, triggering a flood of bounce-backs from the receiving domains that have been ending up in my junk mailboxes. Amusingly about 90% of the returns are “Out of Office” auto-replies which means all this spam is actually getting through corporate and personal firewalls and spam filters.
My initial reaction was to think that the spammers were stupid for sending spam at the one time of year the least number of people will actually be around to receive it in real-time.
However on further reflection I now think Christmas is the perfect time of year to send out massive amounts of spam. If you’re a spammer that is, and if you have a means of receiving all those well-meaning Out of Office responses yourself. Every single one of those is tacit confirmation that the spam email made it through whatever obviously feeble mechanisms are in place on the receiving end, and that the email address in question is valid.
As a preventative I suggest that if you do set up an Out of Office auto-response you also create a rule that prevents your email client from sending Out of Office responses to anyone who isn’t part of the company you work for and isn’t in your address book (I’m particularly looking at you to do this, Outlook-using corporate IT departments).
Why give those scum-sucking spammers yet another edge in this battle?
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