Occasional Thoughts

Once again I had to change me email address due to a heavily increased amount of SPAM. You can reach me at <firstname>.<lastname>@yeap.de (replace everything wihtin the angle brackets by the appropriate words, so that you get an Email address like john.doe@yeap.de).
My old email address was probably too short and easily guessable. Nevertheless I was able to life with it for a while until a very aggressive spammer got me on his list some days ago. Now I get more than 100 SPAM mails that all have a PDF attached and look like they have been forwarded from an Outlook client. The subject contained 'Emailing: Scheck.pdf' (while the name of the PDF file varied each time) and the text content reflected also what Outlook would put into the message:

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments: Scheck.pdf Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent sending or receiving certain types of file attachments. Check your e-mail security settings to determine how attachments are handled.

Thus making it very hard to mark these messages as SPAM as this would lead to every other attachement that is simply forwarded from a real user into the SPAM folder. What's even more annoying is that the attachment as PDF file makes each mail bigger than 70 kb, which sums up to about 7 MB per day. When my home server is down for more than a day it takes up to half an hour until the rather weak machine processed all emails through spam assassin and the system load gets below 10 again. Did I already mention that I hate these f***ing spamers? To me it looks like all these SPAM mails are coming from Bots of hacked PCs:

Received: from your-f1d2630a09 ([173.102.11.79]:29724 "EHLO your-f1d2630a09"

 smtp-auth: <none> TLS-CIPHER: <none> TLS-PEER-CN1: <none>)

 by adsl-89-217-166-237.adslplus.ch with ESMTP id S22BUHWVQVHOPZKB (ORCPT

 <rfc822;y%yeap.de@mail.yeap.de>);

The hostname "adsl-89-217-166-237.adslplus.ch" looks like a dynamic host name given by an ISP. When will these people finally learn to secure their computers? It's time that not only Spamers are sued, but also those that help them passively by connected a computer with an insecure operating system to the internet.