Cute spammer trick.
If you read my post from the day before yesterday about bizarre (spam) fishing expeditions, you might have noticed, prominently placed right up near the top, two little pieces of bait that are not like the others:
| 3jole@bmla.com |
|---|
| 41harvey@phayze.com |
Note the domains. They aren't me, either with the Portland address or with the Chicago address. But what they are is something far more malign:
orc@boobook(orc)$ host -t mx bmla.com bmla.com mail is handled by 10 mail.bmla.com. orc@boobook(orc)$ host mail.bmla.com mail.bmla.com has address 127.0.0.1 orc@boobook(orc)$ host -t mx phayze.com phayze.com mail is handled by 10 localhost.
Yupper, these two addresses are set up to try and trick mail servers into delivering them locally (or, worse yet, to make it more difficult to send abuse complaints to the spamhauses); I've run into spam like this before, and I'm always happy to do the appropriate whois lookups to bounce the abuse complaints up and up the wire until I reach the toplevel domain for the ip space. But it's still a pain to deal with. Fortunately for me, I've written my own smtp server, and can code around noxious dns tricks like this. For the next postoffice release, I've modified mx.c so that it will ignore mxes that resolve to localhost. I won't reduce spam very much, but it will very nicely reduce my annoyance when I have to go in and hand-address a we-don't-accept-spam-here message to the spamhouse, their IP provider, and their little dog too.