I recap my ongoing battle with spam here from time to time, so here's another report: I had to blackhole Geocities. If you send me email with a Geocities site URL in it, those messages will go right to my spam bucket. More on this in a moment.

I changed overall antispam strategies radically several months ago: I abandoned POPFile completely; it ( Read more... )

I've about had it with AOL. I send about fifteen or maybe twenty emails out per day. I sent out several this morning, three of them to AOL email addresses. As has happened with increasingly frequency in recent months, all three came back a few hours later with this error:

Reason: Remote host said: 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE
I see this regularly. A ( Read more... )

My spam count has picked up a little in the last week (to 75-85 per day) but most of that has come from spammers sending from their own servers (rather than botnets) using disposable domains. That the spammers are getting desperate is pretty clear. This morning I got a message that I reproduce in its entirety below:

mSvaqvpes voxvyenrp p5d0c%k ( Read more... )

I've watched something interesting happen on the spam scene in the past few weeks. First of all, the quantity of spam coming to me from botnets dropped radically. I was getting 89-90 spams per day for some time, but very abruptly that dropped to 50-60, and virtually all of the missing spam was botnet spam. Then over the following months, my spam ( Read more... )

I got a new species of phish in the mail this morning. It was a faked message sent through eBay's servers, and some guy was furious at me for not sending him the fur coat that I had auctioned and he had won. My first reaction was a wry grin: I don't have time to auction stuff on eBay and if I did have a fur coat, I'd probably keep it. (This is ( Read more... )

Spam, like entropy, isn't what it used to be. After suffering through 500-600 spams per day for several years, I'm down to 50-70 per day. How did I do it? First of all, I changed ISPs. My email server IP changed, and as several people suggested, it looks like a lot of spammers resolve DNS only the first time, and leave the IP on the list forever. ( Read more... )