We’ve just been the victim of a spam attack. Thankfully not on the weblog this time, but on one of the domains I host. The first I knew of it was when forty or so rejections and bounces from either non-existent addresses, or those addresses which operate a challenge/response system for spam protection, came through to my normal e-mail account – the ultimate destination for anything that can’t be delivered.

Looking through the logs on some of the bounces, what appears to have happened is that someone on an IP address in Korea has taken my domain name, attached a randomly generated name to the front, and then spammed probably thousands of addresses with one of those ‘submit your website to search engine’ type messages.

I really can’t see the purpose of the message though as there are no contact details or anything else in the e-mail aside from the phoney address on my domain. Whilst I can see the way people can make money from spam that actually sells something, I’ve never quite understood where the payoff comes on these messages.

Anyway, once I’d spotted the problem, I just set up a black hole that will just absorb all of the bounces rather than treating them as the other misaddressed mail and delivering it to me. Whilst it can’t stop the spammer, it at least deals with part of the mess that he/she/it left behind.

However, one amazing response that came through just before I activated the blackhole was the following:

From “Ann Shahin”
Subject RE: Your online sales are low because you don_t have enough visitors?
Date Tue, November 8, 2005 1:15 pm
To “Millicent”

——————————————————————————–

Whats the cost?

Ann Shahin
RE/MAX Home Sale Services
***-***-***

________________________________

From: Millicent [mailto:stavrok@***********]
Sent: Tue 11/8/2005 7:32 AM
To: info@sellingtheamericandream.com
Subject: Your online sales are low because you don_t have enough visitors?

Submitting your website in search engines may increase your online sales dramatically.

lf you invested time and money into your website, you simply MUST submit your website

online otherwise it wiII be invisibIe virtually ,which means efforts spent in vain.
If you want

peopIe to know about your website and boost your revenues, the onIy way to do that
is to

make your site visibIe in places where people search for information, i.e. submit your

website in multipIe search engines.

Since I’m amazed that anybody replies to this stuff anyway, and curious as to why they do, as she helpfully put her phone number on the e-mail, you don’t know how tempting it is to phone up and ask…