While the effects of the recent decision by some scum spammer to use my domain name in their email addresses (there really should be a way to stop these people since they are clearly falsifying their identity) are starting to tail off, I have received a few more amusing bounce messages. Here’s my favourite so far, from the US Department of Energy:

Your message contained inappropriate language which is unacceptable at the U.S. Department of Energy. Please make the appropriate changes and resubmit your message.

Thank you.

09/14/06, 00:19:13
Re [2]:

Sadly, they didn’t include the original message, so I cannot tell what the inappropriate language was!

I have encountered a couple of spam related issues this week. The first, shown in the image, was spam being added to message boards. The message itself was a long list of spam links, and then at the end of message it said this:

2admin,moderators: If you dont want to see us anymore click here

If you clicked on the link (or, perhaps wiser, copied the link and then pasted it into a new browser window so as not to leave the referrer information on their site pointing back at you), you found the page shown in the screen capture, which reads:

We are not looking for your traffic or attention,
We just want to obtain links to our sites from abandoned internet resources.

In order to add your domain to our global stop list, please write it here.
If you have more than 1 domain, add them separatly.

This is “unsubscribe” form, not the place for personal messages. Send them to those who
dont provide you with unsubscribe forms, you can easily reach anyone by domain whoises.

I doubt it works.

Then, this morning my mailbox was full of bounce messages. All addressed to email addresses that were a random string of letters @bluedonkey.org. I guess one of the spammers out there has latched on to my domain and will be using it to mask the sender address of their crap. You know, I don’t have a problem with advertising. I do have a problem with spammers though because they do two things which single them out as criminals rather than advertisers:

a) They use fake, and usually stolen addresses to send their crap out (strongly suggesting that they know what they are doing is something that they don’t want traced back to them).

b) They spend a long time trying to defeat the filters I put in place to stop their junk getting to me. If I go to the effort of adding a filter for their type of product, it is probably because I don’t want it. No amount of spam is going to change that. People who do want those services will presumably not install filters to block the ads.

The root cause though is that the companies making the products are willing to turn a blind eye to the techniques that their affiliates use to get ads into mailboxes. What should happen is that the companies making the products or providing the services should be fined each time their affiliates use fake addresses etc. That would pretty soon stop most of the crap arriving in my mailbox since it would cut off the revenue stream to the jerk sending the crap out.

If you received spam from a random looking address @bluedonkey.org, please understand that it did not come from me, nor from this site. Believe me, it has probably been much more annoying for me too since I have already received several hundred bounce messages, mailbox full messages and spam detected messages in response to this abuse of my domain name and it doesn’t look as though it is slowing down yet.

I received a more creative Paypal scam email than the normal ones. Instead of ‘a new email has been added to your account’ or ‘your account has been suspended,’ this one was a Paypal receipt for a new Sony Camera that had been billed to my account. There was a link in the email for me to dispute the charge. That, of course, goes to a fake Paypal site that asked me to login.

I still see a number of these each week, along with the lottery scams from the Netherlands.