Pseudospam

On average, I get probably get around 50 - 100 spam emails within a 24 hour period. That's fairly annoying, but fortunately modern spam filters do a pretty good job of weeding those out. On a given day, probably 1 or 2 make it past the spam filter when they shouldn't, and maybe once or twice a week a legit message will get categorized as spam (although those are usually some kind of mailing list emails that probably look a lot like spam to a filter).

Today something really interesting happened. When I went to peruse my email inbox after about an hour away from it, I suddenly had several hundred messages in my SPAM folder. WTF?

Upon further investigation, nearly all of them were actually "bounces" from various email systems indicating that an email I had sent was undeliverable. Quite a few were also responses from spam filtering systems telling me that the message I had sent so-and-so looked like spam, so I needed to perform some action or another if I wanted my message to go through. Only problem was that all of these were referencing messages I had never sent. So basically, lots of spam was generated to notify me that spam I had not sent was undeliverable. Welcome to pseudospam!

So apparently some spammer used my email address as the sender for the "from" address on a big batch of delicious, juicy spams. It's funny, too, because the message have all sorts of different names in the from field, none of which are even close to mine. This looks bad though. How many thousands more of these am I going to start getting?

The good news is that, at least so far, there was a big blip on the pseudospam radar and then it all went back to normal levels. I'm honestly quite surprised that it hasn't continued. Of course, about the time I post this, the spammer will probably start another campaign and I will get inundated again.

It makes me wonder what the usefulness of "postmaster" bounces are anymore, though. It's great to know that the email you sent someone didn't make it, because you typed their address incorrectly, or they changed their address, but such a notification would have been lost in this deluge. And that's just the deluge I saw directed back to my address. I wonder how much more worthless email traffic must be generated every day to inform people that messages they never sent didn't make it to a recipient they've probably never heard of.