Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam and more Spam

I've been having trouble with my email for months. I'd go to the ISP's site and check my email and it would show that I had an ever increasing number of messages. Finally when it was nearly 30,000 last week, and checking it was timing out in the time it took to load, I had to do something. I sent messages to the webmaster which went unanswered.

I checked everything I could think of, reinstalling software and researching error messages. Sometimes it seemed to work. I could download 10 or 12 thousand messages, but when I checked the website, they never got removed.

Finally, I realized that there were a few emails in the server with malformed headers that were clogging things up. My browser, the Mozilla suite, couldn't download them. So I tried Thunderbird. Breakthrough. I found that malformed headers could be used to launch denial of service (dos) attacks. The ones in my email were probably not intentional. They appeared to be garbled, but the more recent versions of Outlook Express and Thunderbird had been patched to blast through such problems, preventing a buffer overflow that seemed to cause the trouble. When I removed the two offending messages, the rest was just being patient. It took about a week during which my phone was off the hook while I tried to download the spam and get rid of it.

I can't say what a relief it was to finally go to the server and find 0 messages.

I install DSL tomorrow.