Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This [expletive] "Swen" worm ...

I have a disk quote of 20MB. The hard limit (the point at which disk writes fail instead of generating warnings) is usually something like 22MB or 24MB. My ISP changed that recently.

They made the hard limit something like 34MB. They did this without asking me or telling me, 'cause they saw all the copies of Swen coming in and knew why my quota was filling up just like it did for ... uh, the similar worm a couple of weeks ago ... and they knew that every time I log on I'll clear out the spambucket even with a large quota. (Okay, my quota is still 20MB, they just raised the hard-fail limit, but still...)

The problem is that I have to sleep sometime. If I log in every two to two-and-a-half hours, I can keep up. In the morning, I get messages from Procmail telling me that mail has bounced. At least one mailing-list maintainer is annoyed (though good-natured about it so far). Later in the day I remember to get the summary of my Procmail log, look for the word "Bounced", and take a closer look to see what bounced before deleting the log. First thing in the morning, my fingers get ahead of my brain -- I go look-at-summary-delete-log, see the "Bounced" up there, and have no way of finding out whether what bounced was spam, a few more copies of the worm, list mail, or something important. Maybe I need to change my macros. But anyhow, if you've written to me expecting a response and haven't gotten one, it could be because I'm [expletive]ing swamped in stuff I'm trying to get done right now, or because the mail never got here.

I figure bounce messages are getting sent back, but since a lot of what claims to come from "mailer daemon" these days is more worms/viri with forged headers or bounces for messages forged in your name by worms or spammers, folks might not have spotted those.

Time to shine the BatCron-beacon on the clouds and see if the Caped Cru'cron' scripts can save my [expletive] here.

In the meantime I'll entertain visions of virus writers shackled in a pit under an outhouse at a Very Large Outdoor Event and left to slowly drown in [expletive] as the pit fills up.