Spam Flood
I haven’t checked my email since Wednesday nght, and I knew that I would have a ton of email waiting for me. I had a grand total of 1,710 emails waiting for me. 80 or so were from mailing lists, and I just skimmed them before deleting them. About 1,500 of them were spam, and they were junked fairly quickly after reviewing them all to make sure that my spam filters didn’t stop a legitimate email. The remainder were legitimate emails that I took the time to read. The whole process took me about an hour and a half.
My spam flood used to be fairly manageable, then a spammer sued spamhaus to make them shutdown, and he managed to win. I used spamhaus’ SBL/XBL list to blackhole proven spammer IPs. This saved me on bandwidth, cpu cycles, hard drive space, and, most importantly, my time to filter through all of those messages. I used to get about 100 spams a day with spamhaus active. Now that it’s gone, I’m back up to a little over 300 (sometimes close to 400) spams a day hitting my mail server. I check everyday to see if spamhaus is back online because they were a wonderful service. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m thinking that it may return. I’m hoping that it will return.
