Fucking spam

ARGHHH...

I work at a small ISP, and among other things I help out the sysadmin w/the mail servers and the spam filtering we do (procmail-based, but we're trying to get SpamAssassin installed Real Soon Now). Yesterday I noticed that one of our front-end mail servers, which should also have been doing secondary DNS, was not doing secondary DNS. Turns out the /var partition was filled beyond capacity because of the fucking HUGE maillog generated because of the waves of spam we've been getting lately.

Admittedly, it's Not A Good Thing to have DNS + SMTP all on the same box; we've got a new mail server in [very hibby: half gig ram, 4x40GB drives, 2GHz or some-such P4] and we're trying to get it up, at which point the small box that crapped out can do just secondary DNS. But still.

And so but took a look at the queue, and took out 26,000 messages that were just bounces back to spamming mail servers refusing connections. 26k! We use both OR-something-or-other (ORDB died, I think...can't be bothered to look it up now, but we use whatever took up the mantle) and SpamCop's BL, and the fuckers still make it through. Arghhhhhhh.

As I said, it's a small ISP...which means that my official title is HelpDeskSuperHero (tm), which means that I get calls about all this, and have to talk people down off the ledge w/all the spam they're getting recently. It's the same talk every time, sometimes to people at the same office, and it's frustrating because a) I don't have the One Magic Wand they think I do, b) well, I might have the Magic Wand in a while, but not yet, and c) I keep having to explain why filtering out Naughty Words is really not the best idea.

Heh...not being terribly coherent right now; I'm usually better than this, but I'm still waking up and this all just makes me mad. Spammers fill up our mail queue, put the load on our mail servers through the roof, and anything I can do at the moment comes after the fact: it does nothing to prevent it, and very little to make things better. Sometimes for fun I tail /var/log/procmail.log and it's just insane: there is no possible way I can catch everything, or even react fast enough to catch what's coming in right now.

I realize none of this is News, but it's crazy to me how...how fucking crazy this is: we're spending our time, money and brainpower in what seems like a constantly losing race against a small number of people with the ability to ruin email. Spammers have power far out of proportion to their numbers, and it seems like it's enough to swamp us, and maybe lots of other people too.

On the subject of SpamAssassin: God it's good. I use it at home (FreeBSD + Procmail) and it fucking ROX. I dearly wish that there was a Windows version for Outlook Express, preferably free, that I could point our customers to, but nowt luck there: DeerSoft (kudos to them) have a version for Outlook, but not OExpress. Ah well.

Sigh. /me takes deep breath. Soon we will have SpamAssassin installed, I hope, and then everything will be better.

Original entry.