New spam irritation

[thomas@xxxxxxxxxxx]

During the past few days, I've been getting quite a few
"MAILER-DAEMON non-deliverable" types of e-mails at my
thomas@inorbit.com address.

At first, I assumed that some innovative spammer had thought that
that would be a way to sneak spam into my inbox in such a way
that I'd actually open it and read it. Then I wondered if maybe
KLEZ had hit someone who had that address in an Outlook address
book. Eventually, I've come to believe that it was simply a
spammer who was using a mined address to forge a From: address.

Whatever the reason, the irritation is major. I've used that
address for close to ten years and I would hate to lose it. I
sure don't like the reputation implications.

My comments on resolving the 'spam' problem...:

The first thing I now do is immediately forward spam/UCE to the
uce@ftc.gov address. I have no solid info that this does any
good, but it might be a nation-wide way to get something done.
It's also a very easy step. As I understand it, this does help in
at least some major cases, so I don't mind adding my part to it.

I've also been trying to use the Washington State facilities for
dealing with spam/UCE. (I'm another of those Gig Harbor, WA,
participants in these lists.) You can find some good info on
these through http://www.wa.gov/ago/junkemail/ . These have a few
kinks that need to be worked out, but those of you in other
states might be able to reference this when pressuring your state
representatives to help. (And those in this state might help in
getting existing procedures fixed.)

Beyond those are the normal things that we're all supposed to
know about, so I'll skip them.

But maybe most important to anyone on a Midrange list who
might've gotten e-mail from thomas@inorbit.com saying "Spy on
anyone!" or "Make it grow!" or other similar garbage... IT WASN'T
ME!

Thanks for the forum to vent in...

Tom Liotta

--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788
Fax  253-872-7904
http://www.400Security.com
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