When I wrote my article about Blue Security's anti-spam system, I described honeypot Email accounts and suggested that they might be a "junk account" name like fishlips@ranum.com. Because I figured that there's always one of my readers who's particularly astute, I set up an autoresponder on ranum.com that would return a message sent to fishlips with a nice thank you:
"Thank you for emailing fishlips@ranum.com. You're obviously someone clever who reads my articles; I hope you enjoy them."
Ha, ha, ha, clever Marcus, right?
Well, some spammer obviously decided on a pathetic little bit of revenge, and sent out some spam-o-gram using fishlips@ranum.com as the sender. I learned this because my master mail account began to get bounce messages: 12,000 of them. Oh, my, what a witty spammer!
What's wrong with these people? They work just as hard at being spammers as normal people work at normal, productive jobs. Can it be there are people who get some perverse pleasure out of being despised by so many of their fellow human beings? Apparently.
Goodbye, fishlips, we'll miss you!
mjr.
Bellwether Farm, Morrisdale, PA, Nov 27, 2005