Monday, April 07, 2008

Email Assasination

Where am I? Haven't been here in a while. I find my blog is an inverse reflection of what is going on in my life. Relatively calm and peaceful? Blogging. Crazy and overworked. No blogging. Today however I was moved to put the hands on the keyboard and share something.

My email was hijacked last night. What do I mean? Well, my personal email that I have been using for around 8 or 9 years had a giant inbox this morning. I keep up with all my stuff all the time although I don't usually respond over the weekend unless it is critical. As of last night, not much. As of this morning, 10 pages. What the hell?

I started combing through the list of emails and all of them were bounces across a variety of domains across the Internet. The senders were various people but all the from email addresses were mine. Ouch.

I have spent a chunk of time today deleting the various bounced emails and other than a nuisance I haven't been too concerned. More important though is that I am certain that I am a very likely to have my personal domain listed on the RBL. That is essentially death of your email account.

While I have often laughed at the stupid amount of spam that I get from all these poor people who I generally assume are hijacked spam zombie computers firing from all over the world, I never expected to see my name as the sender of one of these messages, much less a million or so which is what I am sure happened. In my case, neither my laptop or domain were compromised, but the net effect to me is the very real possibility that my personal email is at risk of becoming a dead useless email address.

It is interesting to read the stories about the death of email and the various attempts to "fix" email. It is less than interesting to be on the other side of the problem and realize that any of us can be easily hijacked by spammers and rendered the unwitting roadkill in their ongoing attempt to get people to buy Viagra.

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