New virus warning

[Bill Vermillion]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 10:38:59PM -0700, Bill Campbell thus
spoke:

> On Fri, Apr 09, 2004, Fairlight wrote: ...
>
> >And is it me, or has spam gotten worse in the last 2 months?
> >My last few MailBlock reports showed me 8200+, then 9100+,
> >then 10600+, and yesterday I just saw one that said 11800+
> >messages blocked in a 14-day period. And that -discounts- the
> >ones that sneak through that my own software catches, which
> >is about another 5-10% on top of that. Seems like spam is
> >actually increasing, not decreasing.

> The mail server we have designated as secondary MX for several
> of our ISP , and many of our commercial customers is rejecting
> over 60,000 connections per day, mostly no rDNS, major DNSBLs
> (e.g. spamhaus.org and a couple of others), and HELOs that
> appear only from Windows viruses running zombies planted by
> worms vectored through OutHouse and IE.

I had a slightly different problem.  One site [that my partener
actually owns] has one of those names that wind up #1 on Google and
MSN on a standard search.

Our mail server was getting bogged down as that one domain
was getting over 350,000 spam mails a day - things that were part
of the rejections on rDNS etc.  I finally had to move the mail for
that site to a separate server as the overhead for those messages
with the filtering,etc., impacted all the others.

In the end we took out the MX record for the domain, and any web
pages refer to an email of another domain we've designated for
that.  That helped.  Yesterday that domain - with no MX at all -
got 43,000 message - but just going to the server domain.  Next
step is to remove all but the www addresses.

The CAN-SPAM law has had the opposite effect as the quantity of
spam has gone up since the government made it legal to send spam
until you tell them to stop.   And a great many have been told
never to use the 'remove me from your list' as all that does is
legitmize the address.

Time like this make the USPS look good.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com