WARNING: Technical Rant ahead. If you don't care about email handling, skip this entry.

For the last 72 hours, I've been suffering from collateral damage from a massive spam attack.

When you receive spam, the "From" address is almost always fake. Some random domain gets inserted. One of my domain names came up on the roulette of spam death this weekend.

Combined with thousands (tens of thousands?) of stupidly configured mailers, and that amounted to my guess almost 100,000 emails that my poor server was forced to bounce back to the stupidly configured mailer.

Symantec firewalls/anti-virus scanners were the biggest offender. Followed closely by Barracuda firewalls. Followed by Exchange servers. What it appears these servers were doing was accepting the mail, running it through a scanner which determined it to be spam, and then trying to politely return the email to the faked address. Arrrggghhh.... At one point, I was rejecting emails at over 1 per second. I generated close to 200MB of log files recording the mail bounces.

Further, there are just flat out non-compliant email servers out there - those that don't understand 550 5.5.1 permanent failure codes. Those that don't send emails with valid domain names. And so on.

We wonder why the internet is such a mess. Too many systems administrators who shouldn't have a license to be on the internet.

Makes me want to get off.

Tags: Technology