Ministry of Propaganda - 08/Oct/2005: "Spam Deluge"
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Spam Deluge
With the laundry from last week finished (well, it's drying at the moment) and after a good breakfast it's time to deal with the spam deluge I'm suffering from again. Two weeks ago my forum was swamped by a spammer, luckily that has stopped for now. Only the odd entry at the moment, something I can deal with. Then a week ago a spammer forged e-mail addresses from one of my domains. I had hoped that was going to stop after a few days, but it doesn't look like it:
As mentioned it started just over a week ago. Over the first three days I had over 250 bounces in my inbox. Then I went away to Malaga Monday morning, when I returned late Friday afternoon I had 780 bounces in my inbox. Took me quite a while to sort and delete them while trying to avoid deleting legitimate mail. From yesterday evening to late this morning there were another 86 bounces. Or in other words, too much to deal with. As suggested by Spam Huntress I turned off the catch-all account for that domain. That's that dealt with for now, I'll worry about a potential blacklisting of the domain later. But that still wasn't all:
Looking at my logfiles to see who had linked to my sites over the last few days I found they were almost unusable. The reason? Massive referer spam. Looking at the logfile for today there were well over 3000 hits to a non-existing URL with a huge variety of 'spam referers'. Most of them looked like they were forwarding to the usual potency/ mortgage/ slimming/ credit sites. I don't display referers anywhere, so I don't know why the spammers put me on their list. My technical knowledge isn't good enough to install the necessary things on my webspace, let alone maintaining them, so I guess I'll just have to live with it for now.
I'm feeling a little bit frustrated with all this at the moment. I'd prefer working on adding new content to my sites, instead I have to clean up and work around all this rubbish while worrying if one of my domains might be blacklisted. Especially when I read how spammers justify their actions and how they're just 'trying to earn a living'...
(That's enough moaning for today. Get back to work! Ed.)
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Entry trivia
- When writing this entry the weather was: clearing up after earlier rain
- When writing this entry I was listening to: Storm Radio
- I'm currently reading/have just finished reading this book/publication: The Independent
- I recently visited this website/-page: www.copperblue.co.uk
- The last drink I had was/is: tea
End of entry trivia
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