My main email address, miraz at firstbite.co.nz is one I’ve used for years and published all over the place. It attracts a lot of spam — I clear about 250 per day from that specific address. Fortunately these are trapped by the spam filter on my server and it takes only a few moments to look for misfiled messages and bulk delete the rest. It’s a highly effective spam trap and it’s only extremely rarely that I spot a genuine message.
There used to be a time too when I accepted mail to any firstbite.co.nz email address. That was in case someone made a typo or something — it’s easy to do — but I closed off that possibility a year or two back when I realised that for one misplaced message I’d spent countless hours wading through and deleting acres and acres of spam. One favourite spammer technique is to create addresses at a domain name in the hope something gets through. By just shutting off that avenue I reduced my spam quotient by a few thousand percent.
Luckily I have that control of my server, but the people who rely on an ISP email address are stuck with with ISP’s decisions on spam. One major NZ provider is Paradise, now owned by the Telstra Clear Vodafone lot. And Paradise had major problems over Christmas, with huge delays in email.
Following major delays to email over the holiday period, TelstraClear is reassessing policy on email delivery through its ISPs.
The problems related only to Paradise, because of its policy of trying to deliver everything.
Spam is marked as such and placed in the customer’s “spam” folder, and every effort is made to deliver mail that has an address which is difficult to recognise.
[Via Computerworld.]
Spam literally clogged and broke the system for Paradise users. Now we move on to the interesting place where the ISP decides whether or not we should get our mail. Let’s face it, email is broken. The (spam) vandals have broken it. Unfortunately I don’t know what the fix or the answer is.
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Isn’t spam the worst? Email is such a wonderful thing, but they really have ruined it for everyone, haven’t they?
Like you, I also keep my host’s settings to blackhole any mail to my ‘catch all’ account. About a year ago, I made the mistake of forgetting to blackhole one of my newer domains, and there was so much spam delivered in a matter of a few days that it used up ALL my file space! I found out the problem only because I couldn’t FTP into my account.
I am pretty sure it was an attack, not necessarily directed to me personally, but it was deliberate. Email was coming in hundreds per minute. I had never seen anything like it before.
And it was a worst disaster when I couldn’t delete any of the mail myself, I was just too low on resources! Thankfully, my host deleted the inbox contents for me.
I now make sure to blackhole all my domains’ catch all mail, and also any of my clients as well…and I always check my cpanel regularly to view my remaining file space.
PS. Glad you added comments subscription to your blog!
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