120 Megs of Spam
April 24th, 2007
The other day our email stopped working. By our, I mean my mom, sister, and I all noticed we were not getting any emails. Sometimes this happens you give it a few hours and things sort themselves out.
After 24 hours things were still not working so I filled a support request with my webhost. Turns out we had used up all our hard drive space. Was it all pictures of women’s calves, exotic locales, or miniatures? No over half of my server hard drive space was taken up by email.
We all use POP and download thus removing our email from the server promptly. In a pinch my sister and I use webmail which uses IMAP and takes about 30-40 megs of space somehow. There were some backups I may have made years ago and kept online which I could remove, but the numbers still didn’t add up.
A default account was created when I signed up, an email account I’d never checked, never used, never intended to use, never told anyone about, definitely didn’t post it where harvesters could get to it, yet it had something like 120 megs of email undownloaded. I started downloading it last night, I still don’t think it is is finished.
It was at 54,000 spam messages when I got up this morning. 54,000 spam sent to an email no one even uses, had ever used. How did they find this address out?
Random brute force guessing? Some sort of server cracking?
I got more important things to do than download and sort through 54,000 spam that is up to a year old or more.
I used to report all the Spam I got to SpamCop but that is too much work, I also wrote a bunch of custom anti-spam filters but gave that up too. Spam filters work better now, at least the one I use, most of it gets correctly filed and labeled correctly, but I still have to download it. I think at least 90% of the email I recieve is spam.
Spam is but one of the difficulties you will encounter if you maintain a blog for any period of time. If you have advice on fighting spam you can leave it below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Email, Spam, SpamCop, SpamSieve.
You seem pretty perceptive and well informed for a “random web surfer”. Many people apparently knew exactly what was going on, and didn’t do much to improve the situation even though they convinced me to not drop out of the program due to repeated panic attacks, and promised to help. Saying things like it was a misunderstanding, an overreaction, it will all blow over, things will get better.
Those people all disappeared out of my life about a month later, my problems have never gone away. A few people tried to help. Many must claim ignorance, which after the program was over and I stopped being so secretive ceased being an excuse.
You got one of the key dates wrong it is March 17th, 2005, St. Patrick’s Day. You also left out the names of the other two key protagonists, Marlene Lau and Anne DeWolfe. My willingness to suffer largely in silence helped them a lot. I went out of my way to help so many people, only to be turned on and abandoned.
I never did much about the wide distribution of my notes and study materials, my solution to that problem and when accused of harassment for repeatedly trying to help Ms. Marlene Lau with her internship search, or however they worded it, was to continue to help as many people as I could.
Helping people is not wrong. Just because you go out of your way to help someone doesn’t mean you necessarily will demand a favour from them later on Godfather style. Reciprocity is nice, but some people are not nice. Some people just take advantage of you, use you, and throw you a way a broken husk.
I always told the truth. I’m still not believed by some.
I always wanted things to be better. Many people either don’t believe, or don’t care, or don’t want things to be better. They certainly have not been my friends. That word was abused at the Sauder School of Business.
I can’t have anything to do with my classmates or the program, I can’t have anything to do with something that never gets better. I have to stay away and continue to suffer from depression and anxiety attacks alone.
I had one just the other day, I honestly thought I was going to die while skiing at Whistler.
I still feel unsafe, unwanted, unwelcome, and unwell.
Please if any of my classmates are reading this, make things better.
That’s how it is – often you’ll find people will just clam up about a problem and hope it drifts away rather than face the difficulty of having a resolution out in the open, especially with a tricky subject.
Well, I didn’t want to try and second-guess the situation, as I thought it would have been presumptous for me to do so and it seemed pretty serious – but since you said “read between the lines”, I guess I’ll have to draw my own conclusions.
From what I can gather, things were initially going well on your course. There seem essentially to have been two main incidents.
You were close in particular to three people, one of whom you had an atrraction too. Now for whatever reason, she spurned your advances, and rapidly backed off when she realised you wanted more than friendship. Gifts had been given, emails exchanged, but now you were confused as to the sudden change in the nature of the interaction between the two of you. This also had the knock-on effect of souring the friendship you had with the other two people.
The second main event was the distribution and plagarism of your work during the course. What began as helping out a close friend quickly spread to essentially you doing work for a lot of the other members of the class. You felt deeply aggrieved by this, not necessarily by the fact people were using your work to study with, but more specifically that they didn’t notice or care WHERE the work had come from, and took it gratis, AND then never gave you any help or thanks in return, and continued to expect you to produce class notes for them.
Now there is something that ties these two events together, and you also mention a specific date that is burned into your mind – 15th March 2005, if I recall.
So something happened on that day which was perhaps the culmination of the two problems and led to a splintering of the friendships within your group. Maybe you took it up with the class about the note-sharing, maybe you confronted the girl and demanded to know why she had been acting cold and distant, maybe you were summoned by the college to discuss the plagirism of your work and they tried to pin the blame on you.
I don’t know. It could be something else entirely.
Things become hazy here – in one post you vaguely mention “harassment” and quote the official definition of it from Saunders, and that the college had not handled “The Situation” properly. So there was something else going on here. Either you were trying to make it clear being friends was just fine with this woman, and she took it the wrong way, panicked, and filed a harassment claim – or (and this ties in with the second main event) you were trying to stop people using all of your work notes that had been handed out, and were going to strong lengths to do so, at which some people took offence.
Personally I feel the first explanation is more likely.
Whatever it was, it has deeply affected you to the extent that you still think of it on a regular basis. You also spent a large amount of time blogging about it in an effort to excorise the demons and come to terms with why it happened.
Now for whatever reason, the others on your course didn’t want to repair the damage. Maybe they didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation to you. Maybe they felt awkard about what happened, and getting you in trouble, but didn’t want to jeopise their own chance of success on the course by admitting to being part of the plagirising scandal. Maybe they were (rightly or wrongly) a little freaked out by your emotional response on the issue. Hell, maybe they just didn’t like you anyway and were happy to screw you over. Or maybe your story is a storm in a tea cup and in fact was a very minor isssue that has been blown all out of proportion in your head via the combination with the feelings you had for a girl. I just can’t call it either way.
Who knows. I’ve followed the links to a few of your class mates blogs, and it seems none of them mention any problems at Saunders. So either they a.) feel it wasnt a problem b.) are embarrassed and don’t want to talk about it or c.) feel responsible and don’t want their reputation tarnished.
Is it presumptious of me to make all these conclusions? Yes. Am I likely to be correct on all counts? No.
But by reading between the lines, there seems to be a pretty big story tucked away down there.
If you want to talk more, thats great. If you don’t, I respect that too. But sometimes, it can be easier telling a complete stranger your problems, than trying to tell people close to you.
My MBA was ruined when people chose to not believe me and instead treat me worse than I could even imagine. Some people may still not believe me, though the truth is known to many now. The secrecy was in hopes things could be improved, things aren’t so secret now, you just have to read the right posting or between the lines I guess.
Some people still probably don’t know the truth, most everyone but me have washed their hands of the Sordid Sauder Affair and moved on to a new and better life. I’m haunted to this day and suffer daily and nightly and have tried to distance myself from everyone remotely related to the Sauder School of Business.
It is extremely unfortunate that things happened the way they did. It ruined more than a few friendships. It ruined every one of my relationships with my classmates, I just don’t trust them, or many of them anymore. And it is in my best interest not to associate with them.
So sad. I still wish things could be better, but aparently they can never be. I can’t believe some random web surfer named “tombs” is now commenting on this when so many more knowledgeable just pretend nothing is wrong have have for over two years…
Best to ignore me, that is what most of my classmates have taken to doing.
Woah, hey!
You need to give out some more details of the mysterious “incident” – I stumbled across your site by pure accident and have spent a good hour enthralled in your tale of woe during your MBA. What exactly happened? How did this sad story end? Why so much mystery?
It wasn’t all spam, but 50,000 messages in one folder has brought Mail.app to its knees. Maybe I should have tried Mailsmith.
I can get it to stay un-beachballed long enough to delete them all.