The obnoxiousness of spam
Posted by Nathaniel.
Not blog spam. I think we’re dealing with that as well as we can. The current spam that makes it into moderation only makes it there because there’s so little message that you can’t even say it’s bad.
I had a very interesting spam experience though over the last couple of days. Apparently, some medium-sized spammer used my dartmouth email address as the “from” address on a big batch of spam. That resulted in several hundred “mail server error” emails being sent back to me that so and so doesn’t have an email address. It turns out that there are some interesting ways to deal with spam. My favorite is an option that bounces spam back but then tells the sender that they can resend the message after adding a number to the subject line. So if it’s a real email, the sender can use their brain to make sure the message gets through.
Anyway, they seem to have stopped using my address, so my email is back to normal.