Yeah, I know… I’ve been fairly quiet for the last 24 hours. Here’s my tale of woe….
About 2pm yesterday, my Palm Treo woke up and downloaded mail, as it always does. However, it took longer than usual and when it got done, it blew an alarm, and then calmly advised me it had 2700 more mail messages to download that it didn’t have room for.
Ummm…. Huh?
Now, my mail system is usually pretty busy, but even with normal spam levels across the many accounts I monitor, I clear perhaps 400 emails per day. (Which once the spam gets cleared out, means we’re down to around 40 or so real messages.)
You can imagine I dived in to see what was what, with the idea that my mail server had been compromised, somehow. Several hours of log reading later, I find that no, I hadn’t been compromised, it’s just some spammer trying to sell Viagara under the counter in Japan, Taiwan, and Italy had somehow decided to use falsified ‘florack.us’ addresses in the ‘reply to’ field. When the messages didn’t make it, the servers at the far end, dutifully returned the messages… by the thousands… to the false addresses in the reply field. My system saw the addresses weren’t correct, and dropped me mail to tell me about it. As I programmed it to do.
The result was an overload in my main email account, including the one my Treo accesses every ten minutes.
So, if you’ve sent David or myself feedback, and we don’t reply to you, send it again; it likely got caught in the weeding process.
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