Something made me decide to check my website domain’s unused default email account. I was surprised to see that it had used up 286.77Mb of space. That’s a lot when I’ve never given it out to anyone. So, I decided to log in and actually look at what was taking up so much… Exactly 58,750 unread emails were waiting for me – all unwanted.
It wouldn’t be so bad if these emails were regular spam trying to sell me something, but unfortunately they’re all delivery failures because my email has been forged and has been spammed to at least the amount of addresses that bounced it back to me (known as backscatter). The good thing is that at least 58,750 emails failed to get through to whatever poor random person was on the receiving end, but the bad news is that plenty probably did get through. I can only hope that many realise it is rarely the person who owns the domain at fault.
Still, I feel terrible about it – perhaps more so because I had no idea until this morning. It seems that this started in the beginning of September and continued every few days until the middle of October when it suddenly stopped. If I’m lucky I won’t get a problem like that again, but I’ll have to make a continued effort to keep checking that account so it doesn’t needlessly eat up my webspace. *sigh*