Racist Spam

Direland’s blog claims to have info on the racist spam plaguing our inboxes this week.

One colleague turned on her computer to 700+ emails and had planned to read every one to check that they really were spam. No need, just highlight the lot and delete! We own a number of domains and the long established domain names were used as sender addresses so we were also getting all the “can’t be delivered” messages.

Direland’s theory works generally but how does it explain the emails sent to my elderly mother? Admittedly she uses NZ’s Xtramail service but I would be amazed if more than half a dozen people have her email in their address books. Some may have the email on jokes sent to multiple recipients but those aren’t usually the source of harvested emails. Her username is obscure enough that you couldn’t guess it and she’s certainly never used it on a website!

My gmail address hasn’t been hit, and while I’m careful with it I’m not “that” careful. Is that gmail’s filtering working or is that address out of the loop?

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for this one to burn out.