Markus’ Blog

Has your e-mail address ever been used as sender address in spam? Count yourself lucky if your answer is no. Mine has — as of yesterday night. My main e-mail address, that is, the one I never give out to sign up for something, the one I never enter on web forms. Bloody fuck!

Needless to say I am highly pissed.

I hate spam and consider spammers the scum of mankind in the 21st century. And now this. Guys, I hate you lots already, you don’t need to try getting me to hate you even more.

So far, the fall out has “only” been bounces (“mail could not be delivered”) and auto replies (“Thank you for your e-mail regarding ‘V*1*AGRA’. I am currently out of the office, but will read your e-mail when I return.”). I got 50 51 of those between Mar. 27, 22:56 and Mar. 28, 04:52 Mar. 28, 08:05.

If that’s it, then I got away fairly “good”. I don’t think it’s over yet, though. What pisses me off the most is that I can’t do ANYTHING about it. NOTHING. They send spam with my e-mail address and I get to sit back and watch, and receive — at the very least — all the bounces and auto replies. However, if I’m truly “lucky”, I’ll get (some of) the blame for sending the spam, too.

I am waiting for two things now:

1. that those fucking bastards keep re-useing my e-mail address in future spam runs, i.e. it’ll never end and I’ll have to can my e-mail address. They have it now, so why not keep using it. Stuff it into a big database and have the spam sending software randomly pick it.
2. for pissed off people, who still don’t know that spammers fake sender addresses, telling me to stop trying to sell them pills or other shit and threatening me with law suits or something.

Just lovely.

I am dying to know how they got a hold of my e-mail address. That would be very, very, VERY interesting. Alas, I am never going to find out.

PS: Oh, another bounce just came in as I was typing this post. I had no idea I was fluent in Russian (and Mandarin, too, by the way, just in case anybody was wondering):

This is the Postfix program at host mail.ngks.ru.

1. Спе�и�ика �еле�онн�� пе�егово�ов. �б�ение без виз�ал�ного кон�ак�а: важное п�еим��е��во п�и пе�егово�а�. (Уп�ажнение).
[...]

We are back from the East cost. Well, in fact we’ve been back for a few days now. Lucky for us, because they are suffocating in snow back there, yet again. I believe there were at least two days that Pearson Intl. had to be closed because of snow storms since we left alone!

For a summary of our less then stellar trip (even though it certainly had its good moments) and how things changed from the plans I outlined in my last entry, see my sweetie’s blog.

Like they said, it’s still cold here in the East. Yesterday it snowed quite a bit in Toronto, and today there were a few more snow showers. Although I have to say it did warm up a bit (it’s even supposed to get up to 2°C tomorrow).

This is how Queen’s Park looked yesterday:

Today we went on a wine tour in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was great — and we bought lots of wine, as was to be expected. And we saw the Falls, of course. Got soked by cold mist in the process. Surprisingly many tourists were running around. We had not anticipated that. We were convinced nobody else would be crazy enough to go and see the Falls in the middle of winter. We were wrong. It made us feel much better about our sanity.

I found it amazing that quite a bit of the Niagara River was frozen solid. The ice was quite thick, too.

Now it’s almost time for us to pack up and head home. Yay for warmer weather! — Before we do that, though, we’ll be having Dim Sum on Spadina Avenue tomorrow morning, venturing onto the CN Tower (I am hoping the weather will be clear) and exploring Eaton Centre.