Spamming Joel Spolsky
Posted by Doug Thu, 06 Nov 2003 15:34:00 GMT
Got a bad email message from Joel Spolsky this morning. It turns out he’s getting “dozens” of messages from the exim mailer daemon saying a message is bouncing to dalcorn@localhost. After looking closely at the headers of the sample message he sent me I think I know what’s happening. Someone installed FetchRss and my config files. The bad news is that they didn’t put their own email address in the config file. So, it’s trying to deliver the mail to me but on their box. My mistake in all this is that FetchRss sets the from address of the email based on the author of the RSS feed. Since the message is bouncing, the mailer daemon tries to complain to the sender. What I should be doing is setting the “Sent-By” header or something. Obviously, Joel is not really the sender and doesn’t care that some random FetchRss user has misconfigured the software (or not configured as the case may be). Oh, well. Here’s to hoping he doesn’t trash me on his web site.
