Thursday, May 29, 2008

I'm the spam queen

If you've recently received some spam from my work email address, you're not alone. Some nefarious do-badder has stolen my address and sent about a gazallion emails promoting everything from designer purses to erectile aids to mortgage assistance. How do I know this? Because in the fine tradition of spammers everywhere the emails are sent indiscriminately to all kinds of made-up addresses. When they reach an email server that exists, but doesn't have that particular email address name, the server bounces the spam. Right on back to my email inbox.

Over the weekend I had hundreds of these returned emails with subjects stating:

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Undeliverable Mail
failure notice
Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Mail System Error - Returned Mail
Returned mail: see transcript for details

and the like. Several hundred get filtered by my company's very efficient spam filter (which regularly gets rid of thousands of spams addressed to me each week). A few hundred more get stopped by Thunderbird's spam filter. The rest end up mixed in with my regular email.

I had hoped that it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, that spammers realize that offender's email addresses get banned for excessive volumes, but no such luck. Today at approximately 11:15 am another batch of spam crap got sent out. Here I am trying to work and hundreds of returned emails start flooding my inbox. It's distracting, to say the least.

The funny thing is that lots of these spams aren't even in English! Heck, they're not even in an alphabet I can read! I just don't get the point. Are there that many stupid people out there with email access who actually buy the product being shilled? Would YOU buy something from a spammer??

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