Daniel R.

Another year, another deluge of spam. This is my second year using Postini for spam filtering so while I don't have detailed statistics I can at least compare to last year. For 2010 Postini flagged 63,436 messages as spam or 45% more than last year. My incoming spam rate spiked up to 250 a day in April, May, and June before finishing the year with an average of 170 per day. A quick Google search confirms that some of the biggest dips in the graph below are tied to known spammers being shutdown.

Tags: email spam

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Doing some quick command line hacks I extracted the top 10 spam subjects (ignoring case) that I received in 2009 according to Postini. Each subject accounts for 0.25% of the spam messages I received with no subject accounting for 0.88%. All told just under half of the spam I got used a unique subject.

Count	Subject
396	[no subject]
127	free cialis
124	age is no longer a barrier for me in bed
123	pay shipping and get your trials
119	le_vrai_jeu_se_joue_seulement_lm-`_om-y_il_a_commencm-i:_m-`_las_vegas!_
115	we know you want the free cialis
115	pay shipping for your erotic nights
115	don't pay anything for your pills for 15 days
114	feel 10 years younger in bed today
114	do not underestimate the value of free pills

Using space as a word delimiter and lowercasing everything, these were the top 10 words found in my spam subjects. Not nearly as interesting as the full subject lines.

Count	Word
8854	your
6988	for
6031	free
5426	the
4851	to
4666	a
4600	you
3587	and
3504	get
3014	in

Tags: email spam

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm finally feeling like I'm returning to the real world after a multiple day buildup and long weekend spent watching prodigious amounts of television while battling the worst cold I've had in a long time. I frequently suspect that when I over extend myself too much my body fights back and lets a cold in since it knows that will slow me down. Well it worked. I'm completely off my training schedule as even biking to work brings out coughing fits, but thankfully I've still got over a month to get back into the swing of things. Besides generally being lackadaisical when responding to email my hermit nature over the past week only exacerbated the problem. Very tempting to just hit delete all and try an inbox zero.

Tags: email life

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I woke up this morning to find over 4,000 messages in my inbox. Seems I was on the receiving end of an email bounce bomb. Basically someone was sending out thousands of spam email messages and forged my email address as the sender/return-path for the messages. Given how these things work I'm sure my address was randomly selected out of some list, but my cynical side makes me wonder who I wronged :) At last count I've gotten over 17,000 messages. The incoming message rate is subsiding but at its peak they were coming in at 40-50 a second. Crazy.

Tags: bomb email spam

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It seems RCN's out bound mail server died. Which means that all of my outbound mail since like 8am this morning have not been delivered... I called them a few hours ago and after being on hold for 25 minutes finally spoke to someone that said "the issue had been resolved". Well it still looks like no out bound email has gone out based on my own tests. Up to this point besides some static IP issues I had when I first got going RCN had been rock solid. Needless to say if you were expecting an email from me, it probably didn't get sent...

And for those that are curious I don't send email out directly from my box since many of the blacklists by default include all cable IPs. This caused problems with email being bounced in the past.

Tags: email neophi rcn

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)