Inauspicious Beginnings
A new blog is born every second, the statistics supposedly say. Not that it’s really likely. This blog grew out of a desire to talk about programming and Belkadan Software, but also because of an event that occurred at the dawn of a new year.
About a week ago, I became the victim of one of the lowest tricks around: reverse spamming, i.e. domain name forgery. Within a day I received over 300 bounced e-mails with From and Reply-To addresses at belkadan.com – all spam, mostly about “0EM” software (yes, with a zero). How many messages actually got through with belkadan.com addresses? This way I get the blame and not them.
As it turns out, this has happened before to other people (see a similar story at Rob’s World), and there seems to be no recourse. I kept track of the computers that sent these emails, and all of the IP addresses were from various ISPs like SBC or some Korean company. Were these spammers working at home? Possibly. But they could very likely also be innocent people whose computers were infected by a virus of some sort (makes me glad again to be a Mac user).
So I hope no one blacklists belkadan.com because of this. I didn’t do it. And really I was probably more inconvenienced then any of the recipients, what with hundreds of bounced messages I didn’t send sitting in my inbox. The messages tapered off after a few days; perhaps the spammers moved on to another unsuspecting domain owner.
In the future, this blog will have product announcements, progress updates, code snippets, and basically anything I find interesting as a developer in today’s high-tech world. Hopefully another attack of domain forgery will not be a post any time soon.
P.S. I wrote this blog software myself, from scratch, using MySQL and PHP. It’s still a bit flakey, but if anyone is interested in a copy, just e-mail me.