I hate spammers!

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I really detest spammers! Most of us give it little thought, but when we receive spam messages, the “sender” is usually a spoofed address. Not spoofed in that it was made up — that’s too easy to test for in many cases — but spoofed in that they use someone else’s email address as the spam message’s sender. … right arrow, center-button … When we receive the spam, that little fact doesn’t mean much to us. But when they use your email address as the spoofed sender, you know it.

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Over the weekend, I’ve received several thousand — yes, that was thousand — bounce messages where a spammer had attempted to send their spam to invalid email addresses, to mailboxes that were already full, to servers that correctly identified the messages as spam, to systems that needed some sort of anti-spam confirmation actions, and more for a number of other reasons. … right-arrow, center-button … What these bounce messages had in common was that (1) the original message claimed it came from one of my email addresses, and (2) it had actually originated from Brazil (many of the bounce messages were kind enough to include message headers from the original).

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Having to constantly delete messages from my inbox all weekend long was very annoying and I had to be very careful, as it would have been very easy to accidentally delete a real, valid, message from someone that I knew. There’s nothing much that could be done about it, except, perhaps, to create a couple of temporary mail filters to assist with the deleting.

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To make matters worse, the particular email address that had been victimized was one that not only delivered mail to my inbox, but also delivered copy to my PDA phone. … right-arrow, center-button … a small detail I missed until late last night. Although the wave of bounce messages finally trickled off to almost nothing shortly past midnight, I’m still deleting them from the phone, where each one has to be individually acted upon with a two button sequence. It’ll take some time to get them all deleted.

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Did I mention how much I loath spammers?

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