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May 18, 2004
Mailbombings
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
Service here may be sporadic for a time.
Some spammer is mailbombing me. (The image is from the University of Alaska, thankfully from an April Fool's column in the student newspaper. This note, unfortunately, is no joke.)
It began a few days ago, hundreds of identical spams, some loan scam. Then yesterday came literally thousands more, from a "Theodore Jensen," the same scam. And today, along with the Jensens came thousands more, with a "from" address of "home rate," at fastemailer.com.
Worse, my daughter is being bombed as well. It's a different "from" address, and a different "offer" (insurance this time). But it's a mailbombing, no doubt. Hundreds and hundreds of identical e-mails, and calls from my Web host to increase my storage (for more money), which they bail on when I tell them why my box is so full.
One more thing. You may be unable to respond to these posts for a time. Someone else is "comment spamming," going deep into the stack of posts, leaving "attaboy" comments with long strings of X-rated links. The way Movable Type works these are hard to get rid of. There are solutions about, however, and I hope Corante avails itself of them soon.
Peace.
Comments (2)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. BillK on May 18, 2004 06:54 PM writes...
I may be being too optimistic, but if you use MailWasher and set it temporarily to automatically delete spam, then it should clear your mailbox as soon as the spam arrives.
Permalink to CommentOnce the mailbombing finishes you can go back to normal use and check the emails flagged as spam by MailWasher, before hitting the delete all button.
2. BillK on May 20, 2004 03:53 AM writes...
If you are getting really high volumes of Spam, you should probably set Mailwasher to check and auto-delete at, say every ten minutes, instead of every half-hour.
Permalink to CommentYou can also reduce the size of the 'spam throttle' so that Mailwasher checks fewer lines in each email, to speed the process up.
If you get a lot of the same spam, set up a filter to auto-delete it.
You can also check in the Mailwasher forum for help or write to mailwasher@firetrust.com
They usually respond quickly.