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Where Has All My Spam Gone?
An anonymous reader writes "I have my own domain, which has its own email server, where I receive all my personal email. I've been getting about 800 emails a day, of which perhaps 20 are real. Suddenly, Sunday or Monday evening, the spam pretty much stopped. My volume of mail has plummeted to less than 100 a day, and as far as I can tell, I'm not missing any real mail — I'm still getting the email list subscriptions I'm expecting, and every time I ask someone to send me a test message, it gets through. My domain host insists that it doesn't do any spam filtering before mail gets to my inbox, and that they've changed nothing about their configuration. I run SpamAssassin on my server to mark, but not delete, spam, and download the whole mess to my home client, and I'm still seeing the occasional message tagged by SpamAssassin. But it's virtually all gone. And I haven't changed anything about my own mail configuration, or the harvestability of my site (my personal email has been harvestable for almost a decade). So what's going on? I can't believe that several major botnets would have vanished overnight. Any ideas?"
Did you install Skynet 1.0?
Hey, what's that siren going off for....
Sorry, we've been down for maintenance and it's taking a lot longer than we originally planned. You can expect normal service to resume by next monday.
Spam Assassin is actually assassinating spam.
On another note, has anyone heard from cousin who is a Nigerian prince? He hasn't called in days and we're beginning to get worried.....
import system.cool.Sig;
... to save the health of the athletes.
...and the Chinese are busy watching 13-year olds win gold metals. Bob
We're happy to help you solve this mystery.
What is your email address?
Okay, here's the thing: nobody but you ever got spam. We all just thought it would be funny to fool you into thinking there was some kind of worldwide scamming epidemic. You don't seriously think people would be stupid enough to buy pills off strangers who email them out of the blue, do you? I thought we'd gone a bit too far and stretched the limits of credibility when we came up with the idea for the Nigerian scams, but I was wrong, you even fell for that! Nobody is stupid enough to send all their money to a "Nigerian prince".
Anyway, enough's enough. The joke's stale now, so we decided to stop sending it all to you.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
A group of the original SpamAssassin developers got together with a group of mercenaries and created SpammerAssassin. It's in alpha, and looks good except it seems to have started a teeny-tiny war in the eastern bloc. Oops. They have an open bug ticket on it.
:D
And you're complaining because .... ?
Without having the spam to process, the server doesn't run as hot as it's "supposed to". This causes a power imbalance, sending more current to the other servers and tripping breakers. Also, because of the lack of that heat, the server room is too cold. The UPS batteries are not storing enough of a charge as they are less efficient when they're cold. If a power sag, brownout, or blackout happens during one of these spam free moments, well, the results could be catastrophic.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Seriously though ... if spammers started turning up dead where would the police even begin their investigation? There's only a pool of what, half a billion suspects?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
They all just got back from Black Hat / Defcon, and they're still hung over.
Yup, and here; still getting 250 a day+ or so.
Maybe they finally clicked that you've already got a huge penis and legendary bedroom performance?
I find your lack of spam disturbing ...
Perhaps the botnets are busy fighting amongst themselves, vis a vis the Georgia v. Russia conflict.
You'll have that sometimes...
Ok, Agent Mulder, settle down.
The Russian spammers can't get bandwidth because the military is busy using it against Georgia.
So Saakashvili is getting 100 emails a minute about pen1s enlargement?
Thank you for your time.