A
Active8
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Active8 wrote...
I've now received over 3000 of these, each of which has a 106k
bytes-long worm. That's 320MB of downloads from my mail server
in Pittsburgh in the last 24 hours. My Comcast cable modem has
a slow upload speed of about 150k bits/sec, so if I were to have
bounced these messages, that would have taken about 5 hours of
full upload traffic. It's hard to see how folks with ordinary
POTS modems could survive such an attack.
good point, but i wasn't aware that bouncing did that. figure that with
mailwasher, you're viewing the message on the server which requires a
download, but it's still on the server. a bounce message should be just
that, a bounce message, no?
i just bounced 15 as a test. that would be 1.59MB or 12.72Mb at 14.4kbps
dial-up upload speed or 883 sec.
it took 30 sec.
from the help:
Clicking the Bounce box on a message or selecting E-mail/Mark for
Bouncing from the menu sends a faked “address not found” message to the
address that the message originated from. This reduces the possibility
of more spam e-mail coming from this address. Checking the Bounce box
will automatically check the Delete checkbox.
Some messages may meet the virus or spam-like material selection
criteria that is configured into MailWasher and these will automatically
be set to Bounce and Delete. However you may unset these checkboxes if
you wish to receive the mail.
end of topic
so the mail is viewed but not downloaded and the only thing sent is a
bounce message.
They're coming in at the rate of about four a minute right now.
I spent some time trying to set filters, but the quasi-random
nature of the Swen email headings makes that impractical with
my The Bat! email client. I'm ready to change programs again.
i know of no filter rule ( i'm using pegasus mail, but checked out the
bat. i think bat would be a good client and pegasus a good list server)
that would handle this random crap.
i'm up to 90 now. about 4 per hour.
BTW, mailwasher can blacklist mail from certain users, so any repeat
from the same random sender will be blaclisted. it has filters. the 2
filters that come with it (unchecked by default) are for mail sent to
"undisclosed recipient" and mail not specifically to you (me).
mike