Good use for recycled spam

You may or may not have been dealing with form spammers, scum that use automated scripts to find forms that they can use to pass extra data to and if the script that processes the form has some weaknesses, it can be used by them to sane spam.

They send out test emails and then collect the results at AOL, or have another script pull the results from the AOL account. I've tried making AOL aware of this problem to shut down the accounts the spammers use, but they have never responded.

I edited the scripts so that most of this junk does not go out to clients, but I sill check it to make sure that we don't miss something valid.

I don't know what happened, but tonight I snapped. I really got sick of all this form spam coming in over and over. Stupid spammers, if they just sent a few messages they would not have provoked me...

I used to have a "Catch all" email address set up. This way, I could give out all kinds of different email addresses and no matter what anyone sent, I would get it. Then about 2 months ago, spammers started using all kinds of random email address names with my domain. It started reaching 2-3 bounced messages a day and finally I had to create all the email address aliases that I needed to I would not lose any email and could then turn off the catch-all.

Then today I realized that I could create another catch-all that would forward the spam bounces to the account of the form spammer. Lemons into lemonade...! :-)

I also set myself to get a copy of all the spam that is forwarded so I could see what's going on. Right now the spam is coming in at the rate of about 180 per hour. So in a 24 hour period there should be about 4,000 at that rate.

(hris