I’m currently away from Belgrade, attending the celebration of slava at my girlfriend’s family. Last night, I went to check my email to see is there anything urgent. And saw that horror was unleashed on the Friday morning (I last checked my email on Thursday evening).
I had 1482 emails, all but few dozens being some kind of virus (probably some new variation) and all with 75k in size. They were coming two or three emails per minute. Until I eventually got time to clear that up (around midnight), it went to 1773. Last month, I have passed the 1GB quota for incoming mail I have at my ISP. The steady rise in spams and viruses finally cought up with me and I was unable to receive mail for few days, until the new accounting period came (the ISP kindly gave me higher quota to overcome the problem).
However, with the speed this is coming now, I have a feeling I will reach 1GB sooner. This wave will hopefully calm down soon, but it’s very unpleasant. Sifting through 1500 emails one could easily miss something important. I’m far from 4 million emails per day that Bill Gates gets hit with, but from the emails I got from ISP owners, I could easily be the most spammed person in Serbia. They litterally told me that new viruses usually result in waves of emails but nothing even close to what is happening to me. :(
The thing is – all these emails look just like regular emails and can be detected as virus infected shit only after they are received. There is no blind option you can set and kill them, as all the efficient system require human intervention. One look at the email I can tell whether this is real mail of spam/virus, but there is nothing that email server can look up or check for.
I got some statistics from the ISP. That month, I have received over 37.000 emails with viruses (those that passed spam-database checks) from little over 25.000 email addresses. How can one defend from that?
I don’t see any reasonable solution to this, except that some very updated virus-scanning software is installed on every possible node that email gets transfered through and which will scan for it.
For what is worth, if you really need to contact me, use the contact form on this web site. That’s the only way I can guarantee that will get through to me. For now.
Your ISP should be capable of filtering the vast majority of emails and marking them as spam. They can look for common words, misspellings, tricks the spammers use.
The other defence is to change your email address completely, but never publish it in a form that can be harvested on the net.
I get a lot of spam, but use Opera 7 to filter nearly all of it so I can see only the genuine emails. Of course 1 or 2 still get marked as spam by mistake, or vice versa, but I can easily spot them.
BTW, can you look at this page in Opera? The form labels are not quite right (I can’t read the last one). The page also appears to suffer from an Opera bug I have noticed on another site, which makes the page extremely wide!
I’m buggin’ the ISP about that problem and awaiting the answer. Will see how it goes but I have grave concerns.
I compared my incoming mail stats with one friend (on same ISP). He had 167kB of mails yesterday — I had 140MB.
This is either a general wave of virus spams that hits everybody (and I’m on more spam lists than other people) or is someone having a bad grudge with me. If so, he’s doing it pretty good.
On a side note — thanks for letting me know about Opera problem — I will fix it asap.
OK, I have narrowed this down to a testcase based on this page. It is due to just two lines of CSS that style the fieldsets and the labels. I have also posted this to the Opera support forum, where you’ll find the testcase. I hope someone comes up with a solution!
http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=73653
This seems to be a pretty hard bug on Opera’s side. I read the thread on my.opera and tried a few things, but no matter what I do some other browser gets screwed. :(
If I remove the
margin-left: -200pxline, then Firefox is OK — the labels overflow to the left, but in Safari they are held inside of the fixed fieldset width and thus look ugly.So it’s either ugly in Opera or in Safari (and probably in Omniweb and Konqueror too). I think I will left it as it is, as I’m short of time to redo the comment form.
Thanks for the effor though — I was not aware that Opera has problems with floated fieldsets. :s
Sounds like your ISP needs a script that will delete common virus attachments for you.