Last week I finally tired of the 2000+ spams a day that were coming into darwinwars.com. My lovely little Python script showed that about 75-80% of them were dictionary attacks so I fixed things so that all mail was refused (not even bounced) to all but six addresses in that domain. Four were accounts I use for shopping or interacting with people who write through the blog. They get forwarded to me properly. Two were old personal accounts, now spam-swamped. They get bounced with a message to try an address at thewormbook.com instead, on the off-chance that they are legitimate.
The result has been that my spam went down to about three messages per day. Shutting off “sales”, “info”, and “extension” at thewormbook.com killed off most of those. Now I can proudly announce that in the last four days SpamAssassin has caught only two spams. Both were sent to the address I have been using to sign blog comments with. I thought MT made this difficult to harvest, but it’s clearly worth somebody’s trouble, since both were 419 scams, from purported European banks.