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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?"
*Checks mail logs*
Yeh, you need to ask the ISP again. No sign of slowing here.
Did you install Skynet 1.0?
Hey, what's that siren going off for....
Per Ars, a 100,000 machine bot net was shut down recently. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080814-police-nab-shadow-creators-force-botnet-to-commit-suicide.html
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.
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
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
He isn't complaining. It isn't wrong to ask questions when things unexpectedly go well.
I run a web hosting company and over the past couple weeks I've had a few customers report that the amount of spam has dropped. Of course, they thought that this was something wrong, but I couldn't find any evidence of increased failures, it was just that there was slightly less mail coming in.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/12/191255&from=rss
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/georgia-takes-a-beating-in-the-cyberwar-with-russia/
When the crisis abates, I expect the botnets will be returned to their regularly scheduled duties. Quite a versatile tool those botnets -- pimping V!agr4, collapsing government sites, enhancing the male doodad, distributing pr0n, bullying your neighbors (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6665145.stm). For the cost of one M1A1 tank tread, Putin bought himself a whole lot of firepower.
Advantage: Putin.
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.
That might actually be a not bad idea. Sending him something that can be confirmed as having been sent, and as being spammy.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
Amen.
It's like we speak the same language.
Change is good. Unexpected change is very, very bad.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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!
They all just got back from Black Hat / Defcon, and they're still hung over.
I find your lack of spam disturbing ...
Most spam is sent by bot-nets, mostly composed by infected pc of workplaces, school and private homes. In many countries during the second and third week of August many schools and workplaces are closed so their pc are just turned off, this mean that the bot-nets have less active nodes and so are less effective. I do receive less spam too but I think that it will be back to the sad old amount at the end of the summer :(
Unluckily Murphy was right.
I've just checked my work's logs (an ISP). The number of hits in the spam taggers fell from 12/sec to 3/sec earlier this week.
So either we're identifying less spam, or there is in fact less of it.
and you will block quite a few legit bounces too for two reasons
1: 12 hours is nowhere near long enough
2: the message may be routed through multiple servers before finally getting bounced.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register