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The Spam Just Won't Stop

Authors: Kévin <mailto:document@redacted.id>

Date: 2022-01-31

There seems to be a huge increase in junk mail coming across again, this time because most sane email services get a bit stricter on SPF / DKIM validation it makes it a bit hard to push through using the old style methods.

Of course this means that contact form spam seems to be a thing again, the last time this happened at a great volume was before formmail.pl locked down properly.

That of course also causes a problem for the spam filters, so I get a *lot* of slip throughs, because I have so many legacy emails or that I have my first name @ one of my huge portfolio of domains directing to my mailbox.

I made the decision a while back to keep everything in one mailbox and direct all these external domains in there. Great for consistency, easy of use, and just remaining sane. Massively terrible when botnets give it a go to fire emails down.

There is of course another problem I wrote about a bit, mainly for the end user of that junk.

free.mg is not spamming you | Redacted Identity by OH.MG https://redacted.id/f6995e7a

I've also probably found myself a bit more protected when I was more actively using CloudFlare to middle man my servers, there are somethings that CF are good at, but as we've seen from their downtime, or Google no longer keeping with "Don't be evil", you can't trust a corporate MITM because one day, they'll just start creating bomb drone AI.

Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct https://omg.singles/XcOvQ

Now that I'm self hosting and using more static delivery of content, it's unbelievably easy for bots to scour the code to pull anything that looks like an email address. Granted by blocking AWS IP Blocks from accessing the site, it has dropped a huge fold but once an email gets in there, it's doomed forever.

Which brings me (eventually) to my point, it is time to start dumping legacy email addresses or ones that were set-up for legitimate and specific reasons.

OH.MG Labs was a great idea I had to encompass some of the things I was running around the side lines, I made it easy to contact me about a specific thing. However, these labs email addresses are getting 100% spam that are sliding through my filters because of the system I use to set-up "detached" email addresses.

The take away from all this is, as of right now, all email addresses @labs.oh.mg are dead. Sorry, not sorry.

While that's not great, it does mean I have started to look at a lot of things, what domains are going to be dropped, sites that need to go in to the /archive/ and working more actively at certain core activities.

I'm currently working up a new technical backend to free.mg and a total re-dev of that site, pushing further with the concept of the BBS user sites too.

There we go.