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I am the Most Spammed Person in the World
jefp writes "In November 2004, Microsoft's second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some headlines by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day. At the time, I was dealing with a little spam problem of my own - I was getting around a million spams per day. I found it a little comforting that my problem wasn't quite as bad as Bill's. However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer corrected himself, saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million per year.
This means I was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates.
I've written a tutorial explaining why I get so much crapmail and how I deal with it."
I'm pretty sure whoever runs nowhere.com can give you a run for your money in the most spam inbound. Although a lot of those are probably from organizations thinking they're sending to legit opt-in requests.
Hi Pokey!
-jim
It would be interesting to know what his favorite spam type is. My personal favorite are the African princes who always need access to my bank account for something sketchy.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
I like his slam on qmail. Does djb ever address such concerns?
-mkb
I always wondered this. OK, Bill Gates gets a lot of email just because of who he is. But why do "everyday" people get hundereds of SPAM messages a day? I don't get it. Are you just handing out your email to everyone? Are these unfiltered messages on your own mail server? I just don't get how you can possibly get that many SPAMs in a day. I have 5 email accounts at various providers, and I get maybe 5-10 a day TOTAL. Are my providers just much better at filtering? Am I just more careful about who gets my email address?
I have to think that if you get that many SPAMs a day, it is because you are loose and easy with the address, or have a high-profile address.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
thanks for the plug xtracto, I created and maintain dodgeit.com :-)
We were getting well over 1 million spams a day before we started using DNS blacklists. I'm stunned that the story author is weathering the storm with sendmail. I never could configure that beast. Dodgeit is a postfix shop.
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This guy's SMTP server:Pipelining is turned on for untrusted hosts. Nice.
Either way, a good portion of the spam hitting my system never even makes it to EHLO/HELO time because if there's any sort of resolution problems with the dns/rdns or if the hostname contains the IP address in it (RFC violation) I delay the connection 20 seonds before the greeting. RFC states clients WILL NOT send data unless asked to do so, except for pipelining which is not advertised for untrusted hosts. When the MTA sees a bunch of incoming crap, it drops the connection because they violated the RFC rules for handshaking (clients MUST wait for the greeting). This does not affect legit MTAs with temporary problems.
I go through a whole bunch of other checks even before DATA time, delaying at each step if there's a problem. 90% of the spam/viruses never even make it to scanning for spam/viruses because they violate something before that and the connection get drops (or they drop it from waiting). Once again, delaying 20 seconds does NOT affect legit MTAs.
Big writeup on SPAM filtering
My MTA
Greylisting will prevent you from receiving email from a variety of non-complying SMTP hosts. Lotus Notes/Domino/Whatnot among others, IIRC.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I'd really like to see everyone adopt SPF so I can start refusing domains that don't have SPF records published for them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The nice part is that it only takes one major ISP enabling greylisting to automagically fix those out-of-spec servers. People might not fix their configurations for me, but I'm pretty sure they might respond differently to AOL or Earthlink.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have had the same address since 1989, long before there WAS a spam problem. My email address was all over Usenet when Cantor and Seigel sent out their first spame, which means it's all over Google Groups. The horse is so far out of the barn its grandchildren are headed for the glue factory.
In 2000, the last time I added it all up, I was getting 300M a month *after* applying blacklists. At this point my mailserver is blocking several countries and ISPs, using multiple blacklists, and running some custom greylist software I wrote myself (for qmail... sorry, Jef), and my local mail client's only seeing 20-30 spams a day out of the hundreds of thousands (maybe as many as a million, it's too depressing to keep track) of delivery attempts that show up in my logs.
If you don't mind changing your email address now and then, more power to you, but I'm damned if I'll give the bastards the satisfaction.
A billion MIPS for defence, but not a byte for tribute!
http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/
This makes it past most filters becuase it is needed for web developers. It renders a page as if you had one of the three forms of color blindness.
Ha---that's nothing. I saw someone modded up to at least +4 for responding to himself with a caustic put-down of his own original post.
I replied, saying "Did you actually get modded up to +4 for pimp-slapping yourself?". He had.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A very nice read:
http://www.benzedrine.cx/relaydb.html
Problem is that when spammers are using bot armies of millions of machines, resource costs aren't such a barrier for them.
The downside of grey-listing is that the easiest way for spammers to circumvent it is to simply use their bots to flood a recipient mailbox with the same message again and again until the greylisting timeout expires and the message(s) is accepted. To the recipient MTA there is very little difference between a proper message being retried and a spambot crapflooding the hell out of a mailbox - especially since some MTAs make a really poor job of being standards compliant and seem to take a 4xx temporary error as an invitation for an all out DOS to try and get their message delivered.
This has the unfortunate side effect of spam zombies sending 100s of copies of the same message for hours at a time. And on systems without greylisting it means a huge increase in duplicate spams being received.