As you’ve no doubt noticed, the scum-sucking lowlife spammers have been working overtime lately. Once again our in-boxes overflow with various offers to enlarge, reduce or invest in various items of a financial, physical and biological nature. And our main ACAMUG email contact addresses are no exception. I had been forwarding email to the president and membership coordinator directly to the respective members’ accounts, but with a garbage to gold ratio on the order of 1000 to 1 its just not worth the aggravation. To try to remedy this I’m making several changes to the way mail directed to acamug.org email contact addresses are handled.

First, all of the mail to all of our addresses will be filtered through me, the web site admin, and I’ll manually forward it to the appropriate person. This could delay the actual delivery to the intended person up to a day in the worse case. If its something really urgent email is probably not the right choice and a phone call is probably a better idea.

2006-Dec-18 UPDATE - Experiment over, I’ve turned off the email verification option because just about all the spam uses forged/stolen return addresses so all we’re doing is contributing to the junk mail in other unfortunate people’s in-boxes. So I’m back to manually filtering all the uunk mail to our site accounts. Thank you, scumbag junk mailers.

Second, I’ve decided to adopt mail message verification for ALL messages sent to acamug.org addresses. What this means is that the first time someone sends a message to an ACAMUG contact address it will be held and the sender sent a verification request. Simply replying to that message lets our mail server know there is a bone fide email account and maybe even an actual human at the other end rather than the garbage addresses typically used for junk mail, and your original message will be delivered. Future messages from that account should not require verification.

As a convenience, the message verification process will be bypassed and the message delivered directly if the subject contains the phrase NOT SPAM, I’ll document this on the contact page.

Not sure this is a good long term solution but for now at least maybe it will reduce the load to something manageable.

On a related note, I’ve also had to delete an internal board members only mailing list because spammers’ automated garbage machines discovered it, even though its never been publicized, and have been flooding it with bogus requests to join, all of which I had to filter out and delete by hand.

Sorry for the inconvenience. If these changes cause problems please post a comment here.