Oh those spammers are clever. They send all sorts of spam to my @orangefever.net domain by using a dictionary attack for potential addresses. It certainly is a pain because I have a catch-all email, so basically whatever they try, it’ll reach me. In the ever escalating arms race, I’ve been filtering all my catch-all mail through a Gmail account, and leveraging their spam filtering capabilities to sort out the cruft. This works off and on, and at some points I have had about 70,000 spam mails in my Gmail spam folder.

The reason for that huge number is because every once in awhile I get joe-jobbed. What that means is that spammers use random email addresses at my domain as the return address for their spam, so in the millions that they send, maybe 1% of them are bounced back or returned to their “original” email address, giving me several tens of thousands of emails that I didn’t send.

So whatever, that was annoying but I’ve trained Gmail to handle it. The other clever thing that spammers are trying is to send direct spam to random email address on my account, and setting the From: address to the same domain. I guess that they figure if the sender is from your own domain, there is a much higher confidence that it is not spam. That’s great and all, except I only use a couple of email addresses on my domain to send mail, so once I realized this, it was simple to create a filter to detect those email addresses and junk all the other ones.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: email, geeky, spam, webgeek