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A week or so ago, I got mail from some spammer offering a “link exchange” (which, in the grand tradition of link exchanges, was that I should provide a link on gehenna or tsfr in exchange for some link buried many layers deep in a “this is our link exchange page.”) I was feeling charitable, so I actually replied to this bozo, saying “it’s not a good deal for me, so no, but if you’d like to be informed when I set up a for-pay advertising system I’ll give you a good rate for advertising.”
No answer, of course.
This morning I got, as if I hadn’t have sent this bozo a reply, a “friendly reminder” from the spammer saying that they’d not heard from me yet (apparently spamming is such hard work that it’s impossible to reply to mail.) This time I bounced it to the domain that it came from, adding my traditional “please deal with it” note and expecting no reply.
Less than a hour later, I got an unexpected early birthday present in my mailbox:
In-Reply-To: <24.04.2008.08.22.24.a28173@pell.portland.or.us> Precedence: bulk X-RT-Loop-Prevention: spry.com RT-Ticket: spry.com #417120 Managed-by: RT 3.4.6 (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/) RT-Originator: lylev@spry.com To: orc@pell.portland.or.us X-RT-Original-Encoding: utf-8 Hello David, Thank you for reporting this spam and spamvertised site hosted on our network. We are suspending the account now. -- Spry Abuse Department
And lo and behold, it was true. The spammer’s website was all gone, and apparently the nice people at Spry have friends in the bofh department at the domain where this spammer had their mailbox, because when I got (in duplicate) an anguished “you’re being MEAAAAAN TOOOO MEEE!!!!!” note from the poor put-upon spammer (followed, at 3am, by a phone call from this jerk,) it was not coming from that domain, but from a (brand new?) msn address.
I love the smell of splatted spammers in the evening. It smells like victory. And if I ever need a different colo for pell and/or gehenna, rest assured that Spry will be the preferred candidate for that job.
Update: I hadn’t actually listened to the stupid phone call, but I caught the first couple of seconds of it today when skipping through my phone messages. It’s a real honest to g-d cartooney – the first one I’ve gotten since I’ve started sending “disconnect this spammer, thnxpls!” messages to spam hosts. W00t, that’s another mark on the Orc-vs-spammer scoresheet!