If I am not responding, it’s because I get 200 emails an hour

I returned tonight from the opening of Temperance to find over 800 spam bounces—3 Mbyte worth—waiting.
   Both Lucire and the Medinge Group email addresses were forged in ‘From’ headers in spams emanating from dozens of sources. It was a spot of bad luck to get bounces to two organizations that our company administers.
   Many were marketing a site at a dot com domain, ppaulcreative (I refuse to link this to give this bastard traffic) and the majority were the result of open proxies.
   Open proxies, in 2008!
   ISPs need to get their act together, for starters, and prosecutors need stronger cross-border laws to go after these bastards for the cost to us.
   And since somewhere between 0 and 0·1 per cent of spams have the sender’s email address, it is simply silly to bounce these back to the return path or the ‘From’ address, particularly if the ISP’s firewall is clever enough to determine the message was spam. I say these ISPs are as much at fault as many of the spammers in creating unnecessary worldwide traffic.
   Meanwhile, among the people leaving doors open were two New Zealand ISPs. Many were American (Verizon, AOL, SBC, etc.) but the overwhelming number came from Poland and Russia. Red China was up there, too, and it was disappointing this time to note that Singapore and Israel had open proxies that were exploited by the spammers.
   Naturally, many were filed with SpamCop and others joined our blacklist. But I suspect tomorrow morning will not be fun, because 200 bounces per hour totals 1,600 over the time I will be asleep.