Ah, the sweet smell of vindication

[annathepiper]

Usually, I ignore spam and just delete it. Recently, though, I've been getting inundated with waves of error bounces off our majordomo system here on the Murk; it seemed that some asshole or other had put the address majordomo@upcc.org onto an opt-in porno list. But because this is the majordomo user on our system, all the porn spam was bouncing... and bouncing over to ME, because I'm the majordomo owner on the system.

So for the longest time this was driving me batshit. Until last night, when I finally just got fed up with it and decided to see what I could do about it. After bopping around google a bit to see what I could uncover in terms of useful advice, I then went through the actual error bounces generated and found two suspect sites.

I did traceroutes on the sites, found an ISP one hop up from each, and sent mail (complete with an attached example of the annoying spam bounces as well as the traceroute logs) to the appropriate abuse alias. Someone at this alias forwarded it on to a second appropriate alias, and a guy there got back to me just now with a nice informative reply as to the IP addy of the unauthorized party who put that addy on the list, and an affirmation that the address would be removed as well as the domains upcc.org and murkworks.net being put into the network-wide block for their system.

Now if the hotmail people will just do something about the bozon who is inundating me with mail infected with the Yaha worm, I'll be 2 for 2.

Comments

[ssha.livejournal.com]

In my experience, hotmail never does a goddamn thing about spam coming from their system.

Re:

[annathepiper]

Oh, I don't necessarily believe that hotmail will do anything, no. But I rather count this in the same category as letters to one's congresscritter or even the President: to wit, it's better to try to say something than nothing, because if I say SOMETHING, then there is at least a microscopic chance that something might come of it.

I did read hotmail's page about how it can't do anything about spam if a hotmail account is being forged in the headers, which is reasonable enough. Looking at the headers on this particular recurring piece of spam gave me an IP address which seemed to be a customer of telus.net, an ISP up in Canada, so I sent THEM complaint mail as well as hotmail in the hopes that one or the other of them will do something about this virus-infected bozon.

We'll see what happens.