LA’s Soapbox

Alrighty… here’s the story. (Be prepared, it’s a long story.) About 3 weeks ago I got some spam that was from some ahole using one of my domain names. This has happened once before a few years ago. Not much can be done and they eventually move on, so I cussed, sighed and deleted the email.

The emails kept coming, with those wonderfully random generated user names like kurt54@. I cussed somemore and kept on deleting them. I have several domains, but this spammer is using the domain I have had the longest, close to 10 years now. It’s also the domain I use for my email addy, which I have also had for close to 10 years. Again, I said, it shall pass. Well, pass it didn’t!

Last Wednesday I received an email that was supposedly from abuse@, there is no such addy. Said email included a link whose purpose was to “confirm your e-mail… or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reason.” Yeah, right, like I’m going to click on a link in a bogus email… been around the net for way too long for that crap. But now things were getting to be more annoying so I did some resarch at my webhoster and I called them, got the call escalated to make sure there wasn’t something, unknown to me, that may have been generating this type of email. I doubted it, but better safe then sorry.

Thursday I get another of the abuse emails and now I am getting pissed. In the meantime I hadn’t received a response from my webhosting company, but I am patient and figured I’d give them another day or two before calling back. Friday…. no email (my email is forwarded thru my webhost to my ISP account)…. hmmm…. extremely rare occurance, but it happens and I figured it would happen just when I am waiting for something important… isn’t that always the way?! hehe

Saturday, again, no email ALL day… too weird. I figure I need to do more investigating of my own. So I go thru the headers of the “abuse” email (with it’s forged envelope indicating ), then I spot an IP address that is not like the others (got that song in your head now? ;Þ “…one of these things is not like the others…” lol, but I digress)… Did a dns on the IP and lo and behold it was from an adsl. customer at Tele2 Norge AS ie: tele2.no. I promptly sent off an email, including all the email headers and all the information to their abuse department. It’s now 4 days later and I am still waiting for a reply.

Since I wasn’t getting any email at all and after doing all sorts of test emails, I called 1and1 again (my webhoster) to make sure that they weren’t blocking anything at their end (due to all the spam and crap this ahole was generating). At the same time I got the tech to forward the email from the escalated call directly to my ISP email addy, which was just another confirmation that my email was being blocked somewhere as they had sent it the previous day. It also confirmed that the ‘abuse” email had not originated at 1and1 and that the included URL was indeed invalid.

It’s now Sunday, still no email. With all the info I have I now figure that my ISP is probably blocking something. I call their tech support, explain everything, then I’m told it needs to be escalated to their abuse dept. which is closed on Sundays. So I call back on Monday, go thru the whole story again with the abuse tech - at least he was nice and knowledgeable - who then told me that the problem has to be escalated to the next level. Sent him copies of the emails in question. So now I have explained the problrem at least 5 or 6 times, not to mention the emails I’ve sent out about it as well. Wonder if I’ll ever hear back from the abuse departments. Talk about a freakin’ waste of my time! GRRRRR!

Of course, in the meantime I’m still not getting my email, so I set up a mailbox with my webhoster and forward it there. I set it all up, test it and imagine my surprise NOT! when the first email I got was Spam! (at least it wasn’t from the bastard that’s using my domain) PITA!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 17:49 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.