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12.18.07
Ah, the Woes of an Online Business
Well, I have ended up mostly wasting away another day because of spammers. Once every month or two, I have to spend a couple of days dealing with spammers or hackers. I’ve had to deal with them for so many years, that I’ve become efficient at it. However, the anger I feel towards these “faceless” persons and the money I lose grows each time I have to deal with them.
Today, I was dealing with someone (indirectly) who has been spamming millions of emails with various lewd offers and they spoofed (i.e. faked) that it came from one of my domains (bitcorp.net). However, I purposely disabled email (and routed the MX record to a non-existant domain) just to ensure that spamming off of that domain would never be possible. The domain itself is merely a placeholder with a static HTML page -no scripts and no formmail available. There is virtually no way to spam from that account.
Every couple of months, this particular spammer collects all of the servers his script has hacked and will send out a blast containing millions upon millions of email addresses. Naturally, all of the bounce messages, complaints, and legal threats come directly to me –since it appears that my domain sent them. How nice of the spammer, eh?
It is usually only a minor inconvenience because I’ve gotten good at keeping server load low by ignoring the bounces and I have been quick to prove that the emails were spoofed by showing that the IP address from which they originated was not my server.
Well, spammers aren’t stupid. They’re just like you and me and the professionals have a lot of experience, knowledge, and powerful tools at their disposal. Typically, these kind of spam rings are run by mafia-like organizations that have a lot of money –generated by the crap they peddle. This spammer has evolved his script a bit and now spoofs even the correct IP address in many of his emails. So, today, I had to spend 3 hours to do a tracelog and backtrack exactly where the email came from. It took me all that time just to prove I was innocent. Oh well, I guess it’s old hat by now. I’m used to proving my innocence (see my bio).
At any rate, this cost me a lot of time and money. I really despise these people and would love to get my hands on any one of them -even if only for a few minutes. It’s all I would need to make them think twice about sending more spam. I suppose the irony of the situation is that their profession is a constant battle and wrought with just as many headaches in their never-ending struggle to hack more servers to send their junk as it is for people like me to block it.
Anyway, the moral of the story -especially for beginners in online businesses- is to find a reputable hosting company and get a shared account or get a dedicated server that is managed, if you have the money. That way, you won’t have to deal with the headaches I have to deal with. If only I had the income I used to have, I would upgrade my servers to fully managed servers over at RackSpace (see review) instead of the lower-price but self-managed servers at ThePlanet (see review).
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December 18th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
[...] with ThePlanet today. They ended up wasting hours of my time today because of some stupid spammer (see related story). Maybe someone will get a kick out of [...]