I wouldn't believe it myself, until it happened to me. I've run small mail servers for various domains for years with only "average" amounts of spam. Then one time I picked up a personal domain of my handle (not this one) which I'd wanted for years and I discovered it finally was free. The moment I setup an mx for that domain I got a firehose of spam coming in to it. In fact it was so bad I had to unreg the mx and leave it for another year before it was worth doing anything email-wise with the domain. Just the bounce processing was driving cpu and bandwidth more than I cared to deal with, even if it wasn't receiving any local mail.
Is there anywhere I can look for more information on how this model works in detail, and how to avoid the same problem in future? It's a real pain in the neck. Thanks!
Hello,
My Name is Prk Aa
We are providing whois data in very low price
Daily more than 100,000 domains are registered
Reply Me with your contact number & skype id.
Warm Regards Prk Aa
Worked out in the end - it only took them a few minutes actually looking at the content to realize, on the one hand, that it was clearly not being used for any commercial purpose, and on the other, that there was no meaningful risk of confusion between my domain name and their mark. They were happy to wait to buy it until I was done with it. But it was a surprising call to receive at seven o'clock on a Saturday evening!
See, you say that, and until a few days ago I'd have felt the same. But that was before I registered the first .com domain I've ever owned, and oh boy has that brought them out of the woodwork - I've gotten more spam in the last week than in any of the past ten years prior! Not just email, but phone calls, too; I even heard from one of those tech support scams, and it's been so long since the last time that happened that I couldn't even tell you when it was.
It seems to be settling down in the last day or so, which is nice. But if it picks up again, I'll absolutely be installing SpamAssassin on my MTA host, for the first time in the going on two decades I've been running my own mail.
To be clear, I totally agree with your point about Gmail - it's far too centralized and unaccountable for my own comfort, too, which is part of why I don't use it for any mail I care about. But a lot of my correspondents do, which means I'm nonetheless in the position of either taking assiduous care to maximize my deliverability, or risking my mail landing in spam folders that nobody ever really looks through. Not a good situation, but at least until someone comes up with a plausible means of addressing it from the outside, here we are.