Of spam and things…

It’s been a few times this last year that I’ve been the victim of a domain spam attack. Sending email appearing to be someone else isn’t a difficult thing to achieve. Yet when someone takes one of your domains and sends spam, well I was going to say on my behalf but I never asked them to, it gets very annoying.
I’m currently processing over 50 emails a day with people’s email servers returning spam blocked or unknown mailbox responses.

My spam filter for my Mail application on my Macbook Pro is excellent at learning as it goes. With unknown users or error messages, collected from having a ‘catch-all’ address, it struggles to cope as they are genuine errors which I don’t necessarily want consigning to the bin automatically.
Sure you could apply a security certificate to your outgoing mail to prove that it is you that’s sending, but there’s a lot of unnecessary traffic being generated by idiots.
Traffic aside, this style of attack also doesn’t help the reputation of whoever owns the domain, a side effect which I’m sure isn’t lost on those who perpetrate this kind of thing. The one time I did get a real complaint from a user, I wrote back to explain the situation but thankfully it was a personal domain. Wonder how many businesses are affected by this kind of thing? Maybe they don’t have catch-all addresses to try and stem the flow of ploughing through malformed or misaddressed mail.
Until such time as my spam filter adopts a psychic approach to reading my mail, I’ll continue to ride out these waves and grumble at the speed of the internet clogged down by all this unnecessary traffic.
(Conspiracy theories that ISPs have no drive to stop spam because they can continue to move to charging people for bandwidth usage as the internet (or rather their copper based networks) reaches capacity, in a hark back to the days when we were on dialup and paying for time online are welcome here)