Spam
It’s often described as a blight on the internet, rightly so. The age old “just delete it” bleat of the spammer has a hollow ring for those of us that have to mop it up when thigs go wrong. Along with the dayjob, I help a few others I know look after their systems, one place has taken up some time this evening. It won’t be a surprise that this has been spam related.
Between the amount of compromised PCs (a whole other rant in itself) sending out malware and general spam, company newsletters, email marketing etc, the unattended mailbox sure can fill up fast. I’ve a fairly drastic use it or lose it approach to dealing with this one, if it’s getting in the way and you’ve left things to fester I’ll happily nuke whats there and in some cases tell the MTA to just not accept mail for that user anymore. Nearly every mail system I look after is unix based and this is a simple task. Fortunately there’s also a few things you can do on the MTA side to limit the amount of spam you accept in the first place, it still knocks on the door of course, you just don’t let it in. Of course if people kept their wits about them, patched their PCs etc there’d be a lot less spam floating around too, sadly I think this is too much to ask. Some people I know run their email on a whitelist only basis - anything unknown is refused or simply deleted. On evenings mopping up the mess of spam this is a tempting approach.
Between the amount of compromised PCs (a whole other rant in itself) sending out malware and general spam, company newsletters, email marketing etc, the unattended mailbox sure can fill up fast. I’ve a fairly drastic use it or lose it approach to dealing with this one, if it’s getting in the way and you’ve left things to fester I’ll happily nuke whats there and in some cases tell the MTA to just not accept mail for that user anymore. Nearly every mail system I look after is unix based and this is a simple task. Fortunately there’s also a few things you can do on the MTA side to limit the amount of spam you accept in the first place, it still knocks on the door of course, you just don’t let it in. Of course if people kept their wits about them, patched their PCs etc there’d be a lot less spam floating around too, sadly I think this is too much to ask. Some people I know run their email on a whitelist only basis - anything unknown is refused or simply deleted. On evenings mopping up the mess of spam this is a tempting approach.