Perhaps the spookiest thing about my DNS adventures is that they showed me again how much spam is out there. When I slaughtered the darwinwars.com domain, I took Pair’s advice and set almost all mail there to be dropped rather than bounce. This means that requests to send an SMTP packet of any sort are simply refused. You get a reply with error 553: “This server does not accept mail to that address”. So, anyone who has tried to send mail to any but a very limited and unobvious subset of the infinite possible number of addresses@darwinwars.com has been bounced every time since February.
This has made my life better; but it has had no effect at all on the people who send this shit out. On Saturday morning, I reopened the catchall address on darwinwars, so I could be sure that everything important got through to the gmail account. Within 48 hours, about 500 spams had pitched up in the Gogle spam trap; another 3,400 had been caught by spamassassin on Pair.
The paradoxical effect of this is that technological solutins work for the social problem — between them the two spam filters caught almost everything they should have done. But the technical problem — the immense ammount of bandwidth, processing time, and engineers’ time taken up dealing with this — can only be solved by social means. Nine years for Jeremy Jaynes is only a promising start.