The recent Can-Spam laws in the US that require that spammers not use fake from addresses has backfired to some extent in that the spammers are now sending bulk mailings out several hours before registering the domain they were sent from. The result is that thousands of messages get stuck in mail queues waiting for DNS resolution that never comes, and all those mail servers send out DNS queries over and over trying to find out where to bounce the messages to. The result is excessive load on DNS servers all over, sometimes with DNS failure as the result.
This may ultimately backfire on the spammers in the long run as if the can spam’s no spoofing rule doesn’t work, they may end up with “opt in only” rules, where they can only spam people that indicate they want to receive the spam. In the meantime, ISP’s and hosting companies will have to set-up redundant DNS servers and up their bandwidth to cope with the deluge.
When e-mail was first created, I doubt anyone foresaw this happening, which is surprising because the old spam was faxing, which cost the spammers money, it makes sense that a free distribution method would greatly increase the problem. Since I set-up htmlfixit’s new mail server, our spam problem has been cut in half, and Thunderbird takes care of the other half, but we’d probably save a good deal of money on bandwidth if the several thousand daily spam that hits the server never got here.
Read more on this issue at Eweek.
