About Me
My name's Mark. I'm a web designer & developer, based in the Yorkshire area working in Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham and Leeds. But that's not the full extent of what I do. I work with many different technologies and people and love things outside the web including photography, print, stationery and graphics. Get in touch and let's speak.
Spam? Inbox: 568,456 unread emails
Hate the stuff. Recently I have been doing a bit of server shuffling and clearing out loads of crap the server has built up over the years, one of which (unknown to me) is a shed load of spam. Let’s first have some figures of just how much spam hits this server every hour and every day (bearing in mind theres only 5 websites on the server):
Exim statistics from 2009-02-15 04:04:33 to 2009-02-19 17:38:11
Mail Rejection (No such person at address)
5210 Emails
Mail with viruses
123 Emails
Emails Sent To Server
14,238 Emails – 5976 Rejected
Biggest Hour
12:00-13:00 – 798 Emails
Pretty large statistics there for 3 days worth of emails! Now, here is the part where I hold my hands up and say I made a mistake. When moving some of the files from one of the website I realised the following:
That is a mailbox statistic which states it has 1.76GB worth of email in there! Thinking this was a little strange I opened up the email inbox…
That image above says there are over half a million emails in the inbox unread. Obviously it’s all spam. Pretty impressive I would think.
This happened due to one simple mistake. I never setup the server to discard emails if the user doesn’t exist. If an email was sent to a random email address this account would “catch” it and store it. Bad idea.
Anyway, if you have a website make sure you disable this feature in cPanel and save youself some HDD space! (also, use SpamAssasin as it’s awesome :D)