The Speed of Spam

Yesterday afternoon, I made a new mail server live for testing. It took until 9 pm last night before the first spammer tried to use it as an open relay. Which is scary. The server does not allow open relay of course, but this just underlines the fact that there are 1000′s of machines searching the internet for sapmming and or hacking oppotunities.

118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:11 Connected
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:11 >>> 220 -***********-An Anonymous Mail Server; Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:04:11 +0100
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 < << helo www.MyMainServer.com
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 >>> 250 *********** Hello www.MyMainServer.com [118.169.205.121], pleased to meet you.
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 < << mail from:
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 >>> 250 2.1.0 ... Sender ok
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 < << rcpt to:
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 >>> 550 5.7.1 ... we do not relay
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 *** <> 0 0 00:00:00 INCOMPLETE-SESSION
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 Disconnected

I hate spammers. On another note, I added a little math quiz to my contact form as spam from that was on the up – again spammer looking for an easy way to send mail through badly written php. Luckily as its all robots doing this, they dont know how to deal with the math question . Capatcha would be a good idea, but more effort.