Mail Hiatus

I am likely to be subject to email hiatus in the immediate future.

On seeing a suddenly-filled default inbox folder (customarily where spam lands, as procmail sorts non-spam), I find an address for me has been used as “From” in what is evidently a big spam run.  The unexpected messages are mostly out-of-office auto-replies.  A handful are from mailinglists that have been spammed but need “me” to subscribe before “I” can post.  Happily my own spam filtering has caught most of the other big class: bounce messages from servers so misconfigured as to accept the spam before identifying it as spam and “returning” it to the victim – me.

After a bit of firefighting to reject the autoresponses and moderate the server load, I instead just deleted the address they’re targeting.  Since it’s an address that is publicly advertised, I can’t make that a permanent solution[1].  I shall keep an eye on the mail log and re-enable it when the flood abates.  Also to relieve the load on the server, I’ve turned off greylisting.  It appears to be OK now, but if necessary I may intervene further.

Interestingly the lists spammed include a lot of my current and former hangouts at w3.org and apache.org.  Happily the “from” address isn’t one I’ve used to subscribe to any of those lists, so nothing should’ve sneaked through there as “from” me.

[1] Or maybe I can.  But that’ll be as part of a general revamp of my mail addresses, and needs planning.