Jack Hardcastle

Recently, I’ve been flooded with backscatter spam e-mail. This stuff is not particularly nasty, but it’s annoying.

Imagine that someone puts your return address on 100,000 postcards, and then sends them out all over the world. All of those postcards that go to “Address Unknown” or “No Such Number” get sent back to you by the Post Office with one of those little yellow stickers on it, saying “update your address book.” The problem is, you didn’t send the postcard, and it’s not your address book. Then, you get back little replies from people who have their butlers sending out replies like, “I’m sorry I can’t respond to your message right now. I’m on vacation in Switzerland, skiing the Alps.” I’m getting out-of-office replies from people in other languages.

Anyway, it’s kind of annoying. It’s particularly bad for me because of the way I have my e-mail address setup: anything “at jwhardcastle-dot-com” goes to me. This is helpful for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is that I can use it to kill spam (i-dont-want-your-signup-junkmail@jwhardcastle.com), identify which one of my clients the e-mail pertains to (whitemarlinopen@jwhardcastle.com) or do things with it automatically (add-to-torrents-rss@jwhardcastle.com). The “suck” part comes in when I’m getting backscatter spam from “lkaslkfghj26t@jwhardcastle.com.”

If this keeps up, I’ll have to turn off my really convenient e-mail forwarding and put in a hand-coded list of 15 or 20 manual addresses. I’ve added SPF records in an attempt to limit this kind of stuff, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. *sigh*