When/If you post a comment (and I hope you will!), be sure to put in a URL --- even if you just use mine (http://alan.batie.org/) --- if you don't, your email address will get put in as a link on your name, and you'll suddenly find yourself on Spam Central. Not my doing, I promise you! They scan websites for embedded email addresses. You've been warned --- I really don't wish spam on anyone (well, ok, maybe the spammers themselves)!
Finally, if you want to be notified when I post the this blog, signup on the lemmings mailing list.
This is really getting insane: my spamload has doubled since the beginning of the year! This is how much spamassassin is filtering out of my mailbox. 800 f***ing messages/day! Email would be unreadable without a good filter like spamassassin. I spent all last night, into the wee hours, using a script to grab the ip addresses of the asshole sites that directly connected to agora in the last month to send me spam, all 25,000 of them. Then I configured sendmail to reject mail from those sites, referring users to a web page I set up to all those wrongly blocked to let me know (something most of the spam databases do not seem to be getting right from all the complaints I hear). So far today, sendmail has rejected 3000 connections before even trying to deliver who knows how many messages (each connection could send a message to multiple addresses, and often does). Typically, I get spam addressed to 4-6 recipients, so say 5 as an average --- that's 15,000 messages blocked. Phew. That should help reduce the load on agora! I'm on the verge of having to build a separate mail system to cope with it all. I really don't like vigilante justice (which is one of the reasons I think Bush really screwed up with his war, no matter how it turns out), as all to often, justice has little to do with it, but heaven help any spammers whose addresses get out!
Posted by abatie at April 22, 2003 05:38 PM