A Captain Oates moment

As part of moving the web site over, I had to move all of the mail accounts associated with it, and owrk out how the new place does its spam filtering. So the Darwinwars.com domain was exposed, for about 12 hours, to dictionary attack spam: the stuff that is sent to random christian names @ any particular domain. This has been entirely shut off for the last fifteen months: mail to any but five particular addresses @darwinwars.com has been silently and automatically deleted without even a bounce message. One might think this would discourage the peole who sent it. It did not. In the first ten hours in which the domain was open at its new address, it got 364 pieces of dictionary spam. The black hole is back in place now. But it does make one realise what hideous volumes of spam are howling around outside our safe tents all the time.