The real evil of spam
June 5th, 2004 by HenThe near constant flow of spam into my user account is a pain, but what really gets annoying is the hijacking of servers.
When I first migrated the server that had sat under my desk in the UK to the US, I somehow configured it as an open-relay and had a month or so of being spam-raped. ie) until the bandwidth came in on the bill. I fixed that. 2+ years ago.
Recently, the same thing has been happening, though I’m no longer an open-relay. Somehow someone is pushing spam through my box and out to the rest of the world. Three possible options I can think of, open-relay, the mail-list (mailman) and hackers (that terrible mid-90s film).
So postfix is upgraded to the latest, the mail list is turned off for a short while, and I’m going to go buy the movie so I can burn it. Either its stopped, they’re not sending anymore today, or the new version doesn’t log the successful relaying.
Plus notes: Postfix upgrading is so well put together. I’m quite stunned. That’s not the way Linux is meant to work, I’m supposed to spend hours tearing my hair out and fighting the system. (I upgraded from source onto a version installed by the original SuSE rpm).
Negatives: Apart from dead mail lists for a bit, time wasted, the fact I’ve been blacklisted at some places, I’m not sure if it’s stopped anyway. Seeing quite a lot of connects from probably sources that don’t say much. Just connect then disconnect. I think that’s just the spam being delivered to my users.
Frustrating, and a waste of 5 hours of my Saturday.