Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Wednesday, 5 June 2019

# 4:45 PM

grump

Thanks to the Sobig worm, I've gotten more junk mail in the past three days than I did in the preceding two weeks. My spam filters are very good at screening the worm itself out of my primary inbox, but they don't do anything about the flood of useless bounce messages that well-meaning SMTP servers all over the planet are sending me, whenever the worm tries to mail itself to a nonexistent victim and forges its envelope sender as one of the half-a-dozen variants on "zack@domain.name" that get forwarded to my current address. This is quite deliberate; I don't want bounce messages treated as spam. Under normal conditions, anyway.

One of the interesting things about SPF is that it would completely squelch this secondary effect. There might still be email worms going around, but they couldn't forge their envelope sender so I wouldn't get any bounces because of them.