Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Perhaps he'd like to leave it to systems he controls? I, for one, would rather a third party weren't silently dropping mail that could be false positives.
Douglas P. Price
He isn't complaining. It isn't wrong to ask questions when things unexpectedly go well.
I, on the other hand, consider sudden, dramatic, and completely unexplained changes to the operation of systems under my control to be a reason to worry.
I'm just funny that way.
Amen.
It's like we speak the same language.
Change is good. Unexpected change is very, very bad.
Check out my sysadmin blog!