Just the other day, I turned on my desktop computer, waited for KMail to appear and start to download the mails. After 200 spam mails I got a bit suspicious, after 1000 spam mails I had to disable Spamassassin to speed up the downloading. After 5000 spam mails I was somewhat worried. After something over 6000 spam mails the storm seemed to be over.

And why did it happen? Was it Mr. Murphy in action? Or a great cosmic justice finally stomping me for not putting the toilet seat down after use on 27th January 2002?

No, it something far more sinister. You see, I have a domain which had (I removed it soon after the episode) a wildcard MX (the members of the audience exchange concerned looks and gasps are heard at this point) as a leftover of some ancient moment of misattentive administering. It means any mail to anything@mydomain.com is accepted. And, of course I had a mail forward to deliver all such mails to my real mail address.

Now, a spammer appears and sends thousands of faked mails with sender name whatever@mydomain.com. As the spammer wants as wide audience as possible, it has to guess some new usernames. Therefore some of the recipient addresses will not be valid. As a result, the system which receives such a mail will send a failure message. And the failure message is sent to the original (in this case, faked) sender – this means I get a failure notice message from all mail daemons.

And then ones mind starts to think of reasons, conspiracies, connecting the dots and trying to make sense of it. The whole episode happened just after I initiated willingness to transfer my domains out of Godaddy. Is there a causal connection? Probably not. In any case it would perhaps make good material for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Maybe the Lone Gunmen could track the spammer down and dispose of the spammer in an orderly manner (i.e. inside a wooden box and positioned a few meters underground, next to the spammers arms and legs).