Wednesday, 10 October 2007

Drowning in spam

This afternoon, in the space of about 2 hours, I received over 1000 spam emails. These were almost all messages that had bounced and 'come back' to me because they pretended to come from my domain. The headers were all something like

To: 405c6081@nntp.cn
From: "lorimer Bunker" [lorimer_Bunker@drianwalker.com]
Subject: snongiad

Cannot deliver this message: recipient doesn't exist

meaning that spammers must have sent out thousands of messages purporting to come from my drianwalker.com domain, each with a made-up email address. I have received 50 more bounced emails in the time it has taken to type this paragraph. Five more came just in the time it took to type that last sentence!

I'm so livid that I'm being abused this way. I'm furious with the spammers, obviously, but I'm also pissed off with Microsoft, whose woefully insecure operating systems have allowed hundreds of thousands of computers to fall under the spammers' control (because this is how spam is sent, you know: the spammers take control of people's PCs and get them to send all the mail). I'm also mad at the imbeciles who (a) bought Windows PCs and (b) allowed them to get infected. It's not rocket science. Buy a unix computer (such as a Mac, or Linux box) or take extreme precautions: there's just no middle ground. If you allow yourself to get infected you're part of the problem. I hope women laugh at your tiny manhoods.