About a week ago I started seeing much higher levels of spam on my main mail account. Someone connects and sends emails to multiple "$name@dalkescientific" email addresses, where $name is "lbeman", "lburley249", "lara403", "srd". I own the domain and am the only user; all emails to it get sent to me. That means I'm getting just under 50 spams an hour.

Looking at the emails, the "to" fields seem to repeat. Some of the names listed above occur three times. A cursory scan of the Received lines suggests it's coming from a large number of dial-up or DSL lines so I suspect these emails are sent from hijacked machines.

It's only a bit of a nusiance. Last fall I wrote a program called "sb_culler" which uses the SpamBayes library to detect spam vs. ham. It connects to my email accounts, gets all the emails, and discards the obvious spam (using a high threshold of 90%.)

What would I do if I wasn't a programmer? I wonder if my hosting provider has a way to /dev/null emails except those on a certain whitelist.