Better Life, whirligig mullet

Spam has gotten so obnoxious, intrusive, and time-consuming. Especially if you're the domain contact and postmaster at a large number of domains. And even with spam filtering.

But then every once in a while, the infinite number of spam monkeys strikes paydirt, and I receive a spam with a subject like "Better Life, whirligig mullet", and I don't even have to open the email because my life is better already thanks to the deep beauty of their word-art.

Ah, pink quivering meat product.

Comments

  1. Spam is really starting to piss me off. We have a SpamAssassin server at work that has been handling on average about 120,000 incoming messages per week to our many domains. Well two weeks ago, we received 180k and last week we received 236k. It brought our server to a crawl during the middle of the week, when we experienced 3-4 hour delays on the processing of incoming mail. That's ridiculous. Today, I received a Dell PowerEdge 1850 server with two 2.8 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon processors and 8 GB of RAM as a replacement. We'll run this in parallel with our existing PowerEdge 750 and should experience some better throughput with these two systems.

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  2. Yeah, we're using amavisd-new and SpamAssassin on one mail server, and it used to work great but needs to be updated. The SpamAssassin rules are old and less effective now, and amavisd-new bugs send it spinning out of control from time to time. Upgrading is theoretically easy, but in practice I need to review the changelogs carefully to look for incompatibilities or gotchas, because any glitch could mean permanently lost email to many people. Important email. People aren't very forgiving when their email goes to the Bit Graveyard in the Sky with no warning. So I keep putting it off, and the spam keeps getting worse ... But on a somewhat related "resource trespassing" theme, I found this story funny.

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  3. That's a great article on "resource trespassing." We actually did see some throughput increases when we upgraded to the latest SpamAssassin through CPAN. For all I know, there may have been a decrease in the amount of incoming messages, though I've not run my stats program yet.

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