Spammed!

[muckefuck]

So much for the afterglow from my mini-vacation. It was gone before morning, when I dragged myself up out of bed with the utmost difficulty and was fortunate to make it in on time. Walking through the department, I immediately felt a wave of dismay that prompted me to ask myself, What am I doing here? Still, it didn't seem that any crises had gathered over the weekend. I caught up with a few colleagues and then set to work. A co-worker came to tell me that he's still getting items routed to him which should be coming to me instead. No problem, I told him, I'll go ahead and e-mail her.

And that's when my morning went to hell.

Of course I'd logged into my work e-mail first thing, but I'd been busy with other tasks (such as searching the basement for a volume which turned out not to exist), so I hadn't looked at it yet. Funny, why is it taking so long to download my e-mail? Over a half-hour later I had my answer: roughly 5,800 spam e-mail from predominately Russian addresses.

I'm not stranger to spam, of course. I'm not even a stranger to this particular type of spam (i.e. bogus "Mail Undeliverable" messages). But it's never been this heavy before. The spammers just went berserker in the wee hours of Sunday morning; at the height of the onslaught, I was receiving over 20 a minute for a period of hours. You'd think that one of the sophisticated anti-spam programmes we have here might've noticed there was something fishy about thousands of messages arriving within such a narrow window and, I dunno, flag the account or something? Course not. I did, however, find several unhelpful warnings about exceeding my 50 MB quota on the server. Thanks for nothing, IT!

But what really makes my day is that I'm working with the most blithering idiot mail programme on the market, Eudora. A substantial percentage of the spam e-mails had something in them (an invalid file reference, apparently) that caused an error message to pop up. Every single time. So I had to hit the "return" key more or less continuously for a half-hour (it helped reduce the pain to put on earphones and do it in time to the beat of my favourite songs) just to allow the programme to download mail that I'm only going to have to delete anyway. There's no shortcut for doing this either, of course; I've been working in from both ends, but I've still got the hours between 3 and 8:30 a.m. to clean out.

Given all this, it seems almost petty to complain about the next bit, but I will anyway. Among the theoretical non-spam were several messages from the realtor we're not interviewing until tomorrow. She took the highly-specific criteria we gave her by e-mail, plugged a few parametres into some programme, and then basically sent us everything it spit out--including crap we'd never consider in a million years. Silly me! I thought one of the things you were getting when you hired a realtor is someone who took care of the tedious shit so you could concentrate on the nerve-wracking decision-making. Did I just get lucky with the first buyer agent I chose?

My biggest concern about her is that she doesn't know our area even as well as we do, and this untargeted approach is doing zero to convince me otherwise. Anyone have a recommendation for a good realtor in Edgewater/Uptown?

Comments

[tanagers.livejournal.com]

My agent is pretty good anywhere, though he sometimes does work through his secretary, which can be a bit off putting. He is really good, though, and works within your parameters. His name is Burt Fujishima. Here (http://www.yourchicagohometeam.com/about/index.asp#bios)'s his website.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That doesn't really bother me as long as they're both willing to use e-mail. Thanks for the tip!

[tanagers.livejournal.com]

He's really good about email. His email is burt@yourchicagohometeam.com. He also always has his cellphone on him and is really prompt about calling back.

[his-regard.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, you're blaming the wrong IT people. By the time you're seeing a "Mail Undeliverable" message, your email server has correctly processed what it thinks is a trusted address -- yours. The real slackers are the IT staff in charge of the initial target's email, who should know better than to send automatic bounce traffic like that.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I think the point is that it's not true automatic bounce traffic, it's a spam technique wherein they make it LOOK like a bounce email in the hopes that you'll open it to find out which thing you (theoretically might have) sent didn't get through.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Thank you, yes; sorry if I explained that badly. These are all "return addresses" that I never mailed in the first place. What makes this especially obvious is that they're all sent to a publicly-displayed e-mail address that redirects to my work account; I never, ever use it to send outgoing mail.

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

This is probably a result of some spammer forging spam from your email address, and you getting all his bounceback messages. I almost had a coronary when this first happened to me about 6 years ago - I woke up to about 250 bouncebacks for spam, allegedly from me, hawking illegal satellite descramblers.

Fortunately, the original emails appared to have come from upstate New York, somewhere I had never been online from, so at least it was easily proven not have originated from me. A few years later, I heard about a notorious international spammer from upsate New York going to jail, and I hoped it was the same person.

I have had a similar bounceback flood hit me a few months back, and this time I knew what it was, so it was merely a mild annoyance.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the actual mail here so I don't know for sure, but this pattern typically means that a spammer sent their crap to thousands of people and forged muckefuck's return address into the headers, so when it bounced from many of the bad addresses that the spammers sent to (as they invariably do) it bounced right back into our intrepid librarian's mailbox. So they are in fact real bounces, in a sense, and not ones that can easily be blocked.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

*shrug* dunno. The ones I've gotten in the past have bounce-ish titles, but the text of the email itself decidedly isn't. Then again, the fact that he got so many of them in such a short time certainly supports your version.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Jesus Christ, can't you use something other than Eudora? There are plenty of other free programs out there that work with POP or IMAP servers...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

We're supposed to be migrated to Outlook (i.e. out of the fire and into the frying pan) when we go to Vista this summer.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Seriously, you're an intelligent person. Couldn't you just inspect Eudora for your mail server settings, then run Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail or something else in the meantime?

Outlook on Vista is still better than where you're at now.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The security settings are such that I'm not allowed to install or modify any software at all on my work PC. (This include FONTS for Buddha's sake.) So the only way to get these programmes would be to put in a ticket with IT (if, in fact, they even support them) and they're just going to tell me to suck it up and wait for Outlook.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

I figured as much... that sucks. Fucking IT.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, fucking IT! Let's teach 'em a lesson! Let's make them wear leather masks and handcuff 'em to their desks and beat them with co-axial cable until...er...um. (If you saw what some of my IT people looked like, I'm sure you'd understand.)

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

http://www.digitaldiscipline.com/Wares.html

[areia.livejournal.com]

I very highly recommend the realtor we used to get our current place. We told her what we wanted, she took us on one tour of a variety of places to get a feel for what we liked, and every place after that was pretty much exactly what we were looking for. I've dealt with a fair amount of realtors, and she definitely topped the list.

Her name is Ivah Urbanski. Her company used to have an office in Andersonville; it since closed and she works from another office now, but she still deals with property up here. She's lived in this area for years, so she really knows her stuff.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

We're interested in contacting her and it would be nice to be able to say something more than "some woman on the web" when she asks who made the recommendation. I'll message you with my e-mail address and you can share your $upR $eKr1t 1dinN1tY with me!