I’m currently suffering a backscatter spam attack, 95% of which is coming from orange.fr’s misconfigured email servers. 500 emails and counting. I’ve certainly seen worse (much worse), but not anything on this scale for many years. It feels kind of… retro.
Presumably the reason backscatter spam has grown rarer is that these days, most mail servers are now configured properly. And yet — it seems that at end of 2011, there are still major service providers that employ systems engineers and product managers who do not understand the basic principles of mail server configuration.
So help educate the fine people who work for orange.fr, here is an article that explains why you should never bounce spam and viruses. And here is the French translation of the same article.
You’re welcome, orange.fr systems engineers and product managers! I’m glad we were able to have this positive cultural exchange.
Did I hear someone say in a French accent, “Let them eat Spam!”?
might this explain why my two orange (freeserve) addresses that used to have upwards of 100 spams arriving each day has suddenly dropped to effectively nil in the last couple of weeks or so? I just hope that those emails that were from legitimate sources that were listed as spam when they arrived previously aren’t being bounced back