Blissful (or less) Internet

That’s right, I got spoofed…spammers used an old email alias of mine and sent out a nice healthy spam attack. Now, the 462 undeliverable emails that landed in my in-box were bad enough, but on further investigation the spam they were trying to send was just plain stupid. I’m not sure which to be more PO’d about…that spoofing of my domain name or the pathetic excuse for spam. It was even something funny. The subject read “You Look Stupid”. OK, so maybe it was ironic, since there I sat feeling rather stupid…darn spammers. 

Being rather Internet savvy I did what any good geek-girl would do…in a bit of a panic I began Googling for answers. What should I do? Can I stop this? Will I get blacklisted? What happens now? I Googled “domain being used to send spam” and thankfully, I found a great posting that calmed me down from Al Iverson at SpamResource.com, http://www.spamresource.com/2007/07/ask-al-my-email-address-is-being-used.html. After reading the article, I deleted the old email alias and got on the phone to my ISP.

Of course, my ISP wasn’t able to help much other than to reassure me that they would not be taking any action against me, that the mail was not actually going through their servers, and that because I deleted the email alias the spammers would likely move on to another unfortunate souls domain name sooner rather than later.

It looks like email authentication may be the only real solution to this problem…but advances in that direction seem to be moving at a snail mail pace.

This just goes to show that even someone who thinks they’ve got a good handle on the Internet and makes her living doing so can be targeted by the nasty spammers. I wish I had learnt a lesson from all of this, that there was something I could actually do to prevent this from happening again, but it looks like I’ll just have to hold out for the universal adoption of some sort of email authentication…but frankly I’m not going to hold my breath.