I've been spammed !!!

man !! my spam filter is going haywire today… in the last hast hour I have received 2500 spam emails sent to me…. Somebody seems to love me a whole lot…

shall update you on this soon…

[ UPDATE 1 ] Looks like somone is running a bot that sends emails out to folks “worldwide” which appears to have been sent by me !!! all the emails I received are auto responders that are automatically delivered by spam filters, or virus filters, or automated vacation responders, or subscriptions to mailgroups/listservers from folks to the “sender” which appears to contain email addressess that seem to have been sent from a domain that I own (ie: this domain). MAN oh MAN I’m in deep @$%# !!!!

[ UPDATE 2 ] I’m archiving all the spam sent to me, and would be posting them on the web soon. I have setup a auto-publish blog @ spam-showcase.blogspot.com, that automatically publishes all the spam I receive from now on forwards. However my mail spam filter catches 60% of the spam and I have not yet figured out how to forward the mail that gets filtered into my spam folder to the auto-publishing blog. I have almost 2500 messages sitting in my spam mail folder. I wonder how I could publish them automatically.

[ UPDATE 3 ] All the emails sent out seem to have a consistent message. It’s about some Human Growth Hormone…. Anybody heard of sixyearslines.com or sixyearsfile.com or sixyearsrow.com or sixyearsrange.com ?. All These domains seem to be owned by Paul Gregoire paulgreg@smxbox.com, Bulk Domain Registration, 175 Montreal Road #304, Ottawa, Ontario K1L 6E4, Canada. Phone: 1-613-482-5333. and all the domains seem to have DNS servers based in china… I’m on a wild goose chase…

[ UPDATE 4 ] The google groups admin.net-abuse.sightings list has tons of information pointing to exactly the same source spammer. Any advise for me folks ?

[ UPDATE 5 ] spam-showcase.blogspot.com is not picking up all the spam because there are too many emails every second and it could also be because I’m using the blogger beta service. I’m turning spam-showcase.blogspot.com off for now.

[ UPDATE 6 ] I’ve changed the visibility on my spam showcase hosted at blogspot to “private” which can ve viewed by invitation only. The reason for doing so is because some of the bounced emails have actual names, email addresses and phone numbers from autoresponders of REAL innocent folks, and I didnt want to make that info “public”. If you wish to take a peek, contact me.

FREE domain names by AOL

Wanted a personal domain name for free ? well, it’s here AOL has just launched their new service called eAddress. With this service you could register any domain you want and get AOL to host your email for you at the selected domain for absolutely no costs at all. Currently the service is available for US customers only… and to only 1 domain per customer. And well, 1 per customer means 1 per cellular number that you use for registering the domain. AOL uses your cellular number to register the domain/verify your identity and send you the registration access code/pincode via SMS. only .com and .net domains are currently available

The 1, 2, many issues that this service has is that it does not enable you to delete email addresses one they are registered, but you could disable them by changing the passwords as long as you are the administrator for the domain. AOL would own the domain, You need to have an alternate email address and a cellular number capable of receiving SMS messages, there are advertisements splattered all over…. {I guess that’s an expected with free services}, and the current domains are restricted to .com and .net domains only.

With your personalized email address, you can send and receive all your email from your domain name, like you@thenameyouwant.com. Additionally, all mailboxes come with industry-leading spam and anti-virus protection from AOL.

You get upto 2GB storage, and you could invite other friends and family members (upto 100) to also have a personal email address at your AOL hosted eAddress for free. Well, the 1-100 friends/family members could be you yourself {{wink}} to use for storage…

You could access your email either via AOL Webmail or via IMAP or any email client like Microsoft Outlook. The best feature addition is that you could also use it to send IM’s via AIM.

Roy Ben-Yoseph, Director of Communication Products, AOL said (prior to the launch of this service):

AOL is about to make online communications more personal than ever before. The most popular Internet activity is email, yet many people don’t have an online identity that’s truly personal and meaningful to them. Starting next month, with the launch of its My eAddress service, AOL will make personalized email domains available to all online users at absolutely no cost. Not only can people customize an email address with their own personal domain and connect up to 100 other identities, giving families, teams, social organizations and small businesses a new way to represent themselves, but they’ll also be able to use it for instant messaging and as a Web page address. This is an opportunity that millions of people have been waiting for, and AOL is thrilled to be the first to provide it.

AOL My eAddress also integrates with other AOL services like AOL Calendar, AOL Pictures, and AOL Finance.