This Friday I discovered a neglected web-based bulletin board on oneof our web servers that was open for posting. Unfortunately, commentspammers had discovered it months before I did and had been gleefullyexploiting it since then. The result gives me an unpleasant, fullthrottle view into the world of comment spammers.

The raw numbers are appalling: in the time they were active, thecomment spammers posted at least 233,799 spam comments (fortunately,the web board only stored the last 10

Overall connections are up from last week : 239,000 SMTP connections from39,000 different IP addresses. The SMTP frontend's highwater mark isup again, hitting 29 simultaneous connections.

Top 10 kernel level SMTP rejections:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes213.4.149.11          13913    638K192.35.251.3          13025    625K

Another day, another Fedora Core 4 Anaconda bug stumbled over. Thistime it is #160911 ,where if your system has any bind mounts, Anaconda can't upgrade itand aborts. (Some other systems call bind mounts 'loopback mounts'.)From the error message that I remember, it seems that Anaconda wastrying to treat the source directory as a disk device and not gettingvery far.

Naturally I was in too much of a hurry to actually get our centralfileserver upgraded

The 'Microsoft Personal Addresses' issue covered in HotmailSpamProblem is not Hotmail's only problem with spam.

Real Hotmail email addresses are a not insignificant source of variousforms of advance fee fraud spam. Much of it comes from SBL and XBLlisted IP addresses, sufficiently many that we've had to do Hotmail'sfiltering job for it as discussed back in WebmailBadSources .

In this day and age, letting IP addresses like 80.179.107.229(listed since January

Allow me to make that more sensational: Hotmail has a bad spamproblem. Despite everything that Microsoft has said and done aboutbeing against spam, their Hotmail service is the source and thefacilitator of an increasingly large amount of spam email.

As noticed most recently by Chris Linfoot in a series of blogentries( How to abuse Hotmail and get away with it and More on Hotmail and Personal Addresses ),Microsoft will allow more or less anyone to register a 'MicrosoftPersonal Address'.

A 'Microsoft Personal Address'