David Ring offers proof that sometimes, doing the right thing turns out to be the wrong thing, in his entry in our Somousepad competition:
"At Backwash.com, we require visitors to reply to a confirmation email in order to validate their email addresses and activate their accounts. As a result, our email address is in thousands of Outlook address books - and starting late last week, it seemed as if every single one of them sent us a sobig virus. As of this morning (Tuesday), we surpassed 15,000 sobig virus infected emails sent to our webmaster@backwash.com address, and they keep on coming, generally 2 - 3 every minute. Sigh. This is where those of us webmasters who behave responsibly by validating email addresses get punished. If that's not worthy of a new mousepad (considering mine is thoroughly worn out after deleting 15,000 emails) then I don't know what is. :-)"
Meanwhile, Michael Hayes proves everyone's a comedian:
Four mail accounts:
(1) @mac.com: 0
(2) @cox.net: 0
(1) @hotmail.com: who knows? The mailbox is always full
But I didn't play fair - all accounts are on a Macintosh, none running Outlook.
Back to Compendium"This is where webmasters who behave responsibly by validating email addresses get punished".
No, it's where webmasters get punished if they don't have a SPAM filter at the SMTP server which can bounces virus subject lines. (Our firewall was already bouncing the virus itself because it was an executable attachment, I just had to tune Postfix to filter bounces of forged mail generated by the virus.)
I also why wonder a unique address wasn't used for the validate robot ...
Posted by: Drew Derbyshire on August 27, 2003 12:20 PMPost a comment
