Spam attack
Jul. 15th, 2011 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dormouse1953When I got back from the hospital yesterday and downloaded my e-mail, I found I was downloading several hundred messages. Turned out these were all spam of the "Undelivered message" variety.
To put this in context, my e-mail address is still with CIX in the UK, and I use their OLR, Ameol, to download not only the conferencing messages on CIX, but also to read e-mail and post to Usenet. I discovered some years ago that when posting to Usenet, Ameol adds a message identifier to the post of the form "memo.yyyymmddhhmmss.nnnnx.pauldormer.compulink.co.uk". It would appear some spam application trawls Usenet looking for things that look like valid e-mail addresses and that qualifies. Fortunately, although it's a valid e-mail address for me, it's not one I actually use so I set up Ameol to delete all messages of that form.
But using Windows Mail pointed to my CIX mailbox, I could see these messages coming in yesterday afternoon from about 14:00 to 18:00. Many of them were in Cyrillic.
To put this in context, my e-mail address is still with CIX in the UK, and I use their OLR, Ameol, to download not only the conferencing messages on CIX, but also to read e-mail and post to Usenet. I discovered some years ago that when posting to Usenet, Ameol adds a message identifier to the post of the form "memo.yyyymmddhhmmss.nnnnx.pauldormer.compulink.co.uk". It would appear some spam application trawls Usenet looking for things that look like valid e-mail addresses and that qualifies. Fortunately, although it's a valid e-mail address for me, it's not one I actually use so I set up Ameol to delete all messages of that form.
But using Windows Mail pointed to my CIX mailbox, I could see these messages coming in yesterday afternoon from about 14:00 to 18:00. Many of them were in Cyrillic.
