Thanks a lot

[mmcirvin]

Bounce messages from recipients of the SoBig virus are now about 95% of my incoming e-mail.

Many have speculated that this incident is going to lead to the elimination of bounce messages. That could be throwing the baby out with the bathwater-- it does seem to me, though, that bounce messages specifically triggered by virus detection are useless, since no e-mail virus uses a genuine sender address any more.

Comments

[jwgh]

Eudora generates statistics about your email. Here's what it says now about my personal email:

Received Email

    990 messages this week
    382 messages last week
    402 average per week


Grrrrr.

The problem with eliminating bounce messages triggered by virus detection is that if there's a false positive and no error is generated then nobody will have any way of knowing what happened. It's difficult to come up with a solution that avoids this problem but doesn't result in people getting inundated by pointless email, though.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I got 3 autoreplies that I assume are Sobig related, but they were all from various motel6.com job-application email addresses, informing me that they had received my job application in one, my resume in both others.

This leads me to think that I should create Sobig.G, a copy that includes my resume. That way I can apply for all jobs listed on the entire internet. The obvious drawback is that, should I need a job, i.e. that I am on unemployment (making, thanks to WA's most liberal unemployment benefits, about what I make now in salary), you have to apply for 3 jobs/week, and if I apply for all jobs ever, what will I do for the following week?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Your server seems to be rejecting actual SoBig copies. I'm getting bounce messages from it, and the bounces say that the viruses were addressed to you.

No idea who's actually infected, of course. Chances are that most of the Sobig-related activity that a.r.k related people are seeing comes from just one infected computer.

[grumblepants.livejournal.com]

I don't get any. Haha! I win! All virus related crap terminates at my pop3 server and never reaches my inbox. 100000000 points to me!

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

What, are you too good to even *look* at my resume? And how do you accomplish this stoppage without automatically rejecting all email ever, or else never connecting your inbox to your pop3?

[grumblepants.livejournal.com]

I'm not good. Not at all. My mail server rejects viruses, not resumes. It's nothing to do with me, I'm lame.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but a significant of the ones I get aren't recognizably related to the virus at all-- they're just boilerplate bounce messages from people who are on vacation, or "inbox full" error messages. I can just guess they're SoBig because I don't know these people and never mailed anything to them.

[grumblepants.livejournal.com]

I don't get any of those either, presumably because I have no friends.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

At least all this junk doesn't cause me a great deal of trouble because my statistical spam filter (the slightly mysterious one built into Apple Mail) shunts almost all of it to the spam dump. I still have to take a second now and then to scan that for false positives, but these days it's gotten trained well enough that they are quite uncommon. It's running over 90% accurate now, so I only get a couple of false negatives a day.