Recently, I acquired a grunty new dedicated web server, located in Sydney as a platform for the new web business in anticipation of some prime time TV coverage on Today Tonight. The side benefit of getting a powerful machine was being able to close down a few scattered web hosting accounts and move everything onto the dedicated server, including this web site.

After copying this web site across to the new server, the only thing I had to do to complete the migration was update aaconsult’s DNS settings. Completely by accident, I was issued with some terribly incorrect DNS settings. The result was that aaconsult.com.au and another couple of my sites went down for approximately 3 days - long enough to give people the message that they perhaps don’t exist any more. Of course, all of my email accounts rely on these domains being active - so my email was completely down for the period also. In fact, my email addresses no longer even existed during this period. All of my regular contacts were receiving bounce back undeliverable messages from their mail servers. So too, obviously, were the spammers. And spam was becoming a real problem for me. I was on average receiving approximately 50 image spam messages per day in one of the accounts - a lot of them seemingly from the same author/origin. Each of these images anywhere between 20 and 40k, enough to clog up my broadband connection momentarily and sap from my quota. I was not far off setting up something like Mailwasher to deal with it at the source.

Now put yourself in the mind of the spammer. Sending hundreds of thousands of messages out each day, its critical that you don’t waste time and bandwidth by sending half of those to non-existent addresses. To be most effective, you can guarantee that you would process every bounce back message received and remove those recipients from your list. I was a perfect candidate for this seeing that I’d been unreachable for 3 days.

Now about two weeks after the outage, I am literally getting about one spam email per day and some days - zero. My inbox hasn’t been this clean for a couple of years.

What turned out exceptionally convenient for me, I’m not saying its a solution for you. Obviously if your site is extremely busy, there is no way you can afford 3 days downtime. But there might be other ways of using this to your advantage.

To cleanse your spamified user@host.com email account, what about:

1. Set up a temporary address using a separate domain. E.g. temp@host2.com.
2. Issue the temporary address to your regular contacts, friends and colleagues so that they can keep in touch with you.
3. Update any web site code that sends emails to user@host.com to now send to temp@host2.com.
4. Go in and manually butcher your DNS settings to deliberately bring your domain down like a ton of bricks.
5. Come back 3 days later and fix up the DNS settings.
6. Go back to using your old original beloved email address, which is hopefully not the target of so much spam any more.

Note: No responsibility is taken for any lost Google Pageranks, search engine rankings or revenue!

Tags: internet

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 9:52 pm by aaron. You can leave a response