You know, setting the backup MX to 127.0.0.1 might not be such a bad idea after all …

From: Mark Grosberg <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: sean@conman.org
Subject: Unung heroes …
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 13:28:08 -0400 (EDT)
> Hey Sean,
I just read your blog post about seaton.biz [1]. Good lord! What an ingenous way to XXXX things up! I never thought of setting an MX (Mail eXchange) to localhost. That reminds me of the Apple mail disaster [2] story from the UNIX haters handbook [3]. The bounceback caused more problems. I guess in 20 years the reluctance to update E-mail software is still biting people in the ass. [HTML (HyperText Markup Language) added —Editor]

I was thinking about this while I was shopping tonight.

The spammers are still sending spam to my MX server [4] and about once an hour or so, my primary email server (which is my main machine here at Casa New Jersey) gets whacked with a ton of spam all at once. All my legitimate email? Comes directly to the primary MX server. Most (if not all) of the spam? Goes through the backup MX server.

Hmmmm …

It's sooooo tempting to set my backup MX record to point to 127.0.0.1. Soooo tempting.

I think I'll keep my spam for the next 24 hours, and see just how much comes through my backup MX server, and then make that change. It'll be interesting to see how much that effects my spam.

If I break the Internet, blame the spammers.

[1] /boston/2006/09/05.1

[2] http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/11.66.html#subj2

[3] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html

[4] /boston/2003/05/14.1

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