It's spam. Just to give you an idea of the extent of this evil, our company got hit with a spam attack recently. Basically, a user here had a password of "password" and a outside SPAM program found it and used our servers to relay millions of SPAM email from a recent Friday at 7:22 AM (while I was off) until the following Monday when I came in and found the problem and shut them down.
It then took over a week of continuous cleaning our "outbound" email queues that were clogged. The messages were one of six or seven content-wise, senders (obviously not the real ones) were Park Kwang of Hong Kong, Dr. Ties Tiesen, Agent Ferdinand Melvin of the FBI Anti-Fraud Division, Peter Watara. Each email that was sent through our system had up to a hundred intended recipients, probably ALL real email addresses hacked from servers around the world. School districts in Georgia, California were especially over-represented as recipients of these spam emails. The relayed SPAM targeted over 40,000 domain names (yahoo.com,aol.com, gmail.com, comcast.net, etc. along with thousands of legitimate companies). Each domain name has an outbound queue on our system and there were thousands of these messages in each queue. I think the yahoo.com queue had upwards of 50,000 msgs in it at one point (even as we were running scripts 24 hrs a day to clean them up). Do the math. It was a huge problem for us.
Legitimate email could not be sent from our severs, the company network slowed to a crawl and I worked quite a few late nights. Most were the the usual Nigerian oil scam msgs, a barrister for someone who died in the UK offering to share his wealth and the ones from "Park Kwang" just wanted you to "think well of South Korea".
Still today, our servers get an attempt at a "break-in" from IP addresses in Russia, Hong Kong, China, etc. about once every 5 minutes, on average. Sometimes we'll get a burst of 100 attempts in a minute or so.
These are just programs sent out like spiders in the night to work their evil magic. Kind of reminds of the spider-like robots in the Matrix trying to break into the ship. It's hard to believe that they can actually profit from these emails (have you ever bought a "Rolex watch" from an email?) but they somehow make money. A while back, New Zealand prosecuted a couple of their citizens for SPAM trafficing even though they were using servers in the Netherlands as their base. They were paying $10,000 PER MONTH for use of EACH server and they were using a number of them. That's REAL money and they got REAL prison time. But somehow it must have been very profitable for them.
This is just a word of caution that this SPAM menace is getting worse and they're getting craftier. The only way to stop them is to make it too costly to do it. IMO, the best way is to charge some very, very small amount to send an email, say one tenth of a cent ($ .001), Sending 10,000 emails would cost a company $10. But a SPAMMER sends them by the millions EACH DAY, so it would add up real quick for them. But, I'm sure the technical aspects of policing the internet and doing the financial accounting would bog down the email traffic from what we expect today so just do your best to NOT become a victim of one of their schemes.
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Today's Featured Article - History of the Nuffield Tractor - by Anthony West. The Nuffield tractor story started in early 1945. The British government still reeling from the effects of the war on the economy, approached the Nuffield organization to see if they would design and build an "ALL NEW" British built wheeled tractor, suitable for both British and world farming.
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