Folks,

I’ve mentioned before how I am taking certain measures in order to deflect spam.  In the past week alone, Packetizer’s mail server deflected a total of 53,011 spam messages.  That’s really insane, don’t you think?  Spam is really a serious problem.

It also amazes me to see how much spam originates from “zombie” machines that have been hijacked by spammers.  I would venture to guess that more than 90% of the mail rejected by servers was sourced by “zombie” machines, most of which are in Asia and eastern Europe.  (If somebody can explain why that is, I’d like to know.)

Still, some spam did make it through and I doubt I will ever be able to stop all of it.

The reason for sharing this information with the folks on this list is that, since I am employing fairly aggressive spam-blocking measures, you might find that messages sent to the lists operated by Packetizer gets blocked.  Of course, I do not want to see any legitimate messages get blocked, so please alert me if your messages ever get blocked and I’ll fix that immediately.  The error message you might receive is one of several types, depending on what software component blocked your e-mail, but if there is a way to send the error message to me via a different account (e.g., a Yahoo, AOL, or MSN account), that would be appreciated.

Having to fight with this onslaught of spam, it certainly brings to light the problems that would certainly surface from any open, uncontrolled VoIP network.  I could not imagine dealing with 53,011 spam phone calls in a week ;-)

Paul