Blog Blasting

This is an open ended apology to those of you who are on my blog-spam list. Friday afternoon, I myself was lambasted (I know, that's not the right word, but it's fun to say) was lambasted with about 50 e-mails, all with the same subject, and all coming at 2 to 3 minute intervals. I figured that it was just some weird spam thing, so I created a mail rule that deleted them for me automatically and thought no more on it.

Until that night when we were at Jess' parents' house. Her mom logged on to find that she had also received a deluge (another fun word, this time used correctly!) from me, with the same subject as the ones I was receiving. That's when I got suspicious. I actually read one of the e-mails and was swiftly able to deduce the problem. Here's what happened:

When I set up the blog-spam system, I set our blog so that it would e-mail me a copy of any blogs that were posted. On my e-mail account, I have a rule set up that checks incoming messages for a certain string contained in the body of the message, and if it finds that, it forwards it on to the people who are on my blog-spam list. Great, fine, wonderful.

The problem is that one of the e-mail addresses on my spam list has been deactivated, so that server was bouncing back the e-mail saying that it couldn't be delivered. It was also quoting the original message in the reply, so my e-mail rule would pick up the string from the body again, and resend it to everyone. Again. And again, and again, and again. About a hundred times.

Suffice it to say, I think that I have cleared the problem up by adding a couple of extra criteria to my mail rule, but should you spammees start getting deluged again, it may need further refinement. My apologies to those of you who have dial up accounts, for whom it took an hour to download all of your e-mail.

-Adam