Egregious Thoughts

I'm in the process of changing my main mail server for hewgill.com from my machine at home on my DSL, to my hosted server in Dallas. Currently, the MX record points to my home machine and most of the spam I get goes there. However, the A record for the hewgill.com web site points to my hosted server. Until recently I did not have the hosted server set up to accept mail for hewgill.com, so it would reject anything that happened to make it there.

Last night I changed the Postfix configuration to accept mail for hewgill.com. I knew there was some misdirected mail that made it there, but I had no idea how much. Since last evening (perhaps 15 hours ago), I've received nearly 400 junk messages to that server. This is happening even though there is no MX record at all pointing to that server (for hewgill.com)!

All of it is worm messages of some kind. Evidently there is some flavour of worm that looks up an A record for the domain name, instead of an MX record, when trying to deliver mail. Now, once I move my MX record to point to the hosted server, I won't be able to distinguish that worm mail from real mail anymore.

Now I just need to integrate clamav into Postfix and check for all that junk worm mail with virus attachments at SMTP time.

Since Amy and I are going to be driving on about a 5000 mile road trip in the near future (more about the details later), I ordered an aftermarket cruise control system for the Insight. It arrived today and I opened up the package and was confronted with a small avalanche of little parts neatly compartmentalized in plastic baggies. Yay, car hacking!

I'm going to try to install this thing tomorrow. Anybody who wants to drop by and help and/or stuporvise (nugget and ivo :) is welcome. I'll start around midday and will probably end up working on it well into the evening. I may even have a couple more tools to sell on gbay after this is done, too. :)