Spam attack continues

4,000 spam e-mails were in my Mailbox this morning. They were deleted but more keep coming in at a rate of about 20 per minute. I will send to my mailing list an alternative e-mail address to use until this is cleared up.

AT&T is completely unable to help me, because of their own incompetence and because of the sophisticated nature of this attack. At first, the person I spoke to today only repeated what I was told, and what I did, yesterday: to report the spam, by checking all the spam e-mails in the Mailbox and clicking “Report to spam,” which blocks e-mail from each reported address. As I kept explaining to the tech support person today, the spammer is using an infinite number of e-mail addresses, so blocking addresses doesn’t do any good. After I explained this to him for a half hour and kept asking him to let me speak to a higher level person with more knowledge, and after he had supposedly asked his supervisor for further ideas but kept repeating the same thing he had already told me, he finally got further information. He asked me to send five sample e-mails to their spam department, which would block the IP from which all the spam is coming. That suggestion—the first departure from his rote responses, which I only elicited from him after 45 minutes on the phone—seemed at first to represent progress, but then I realized that it’s not the solution, because I’m not getting the spam from any one IP. In fact, what I’m receiving is not spam at all. Rather, fake e-mails are being sent out using my name and e-mail address to thousands of recipients. Those spam e-mails are rejected as spam by the recipient’s server and then are sent back to me as rejected e-mail. So the e-mails filling my Mailbox are not spam, but legitimate rejections of spam coming from an infinite universe of recipients. An AT&T supervisor is supposed to call me back. I’m really looking forward to it. Unlike the customer service person I was talking to, who has a 90 IQ, the supervisor will undoubtedly have a 95 IQ.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 01, 2009 01:17 PM | Send