So much love
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.