sorry for the backscatter, internet
So, I have a mail server at my house that I use for a couple of my personal domains. But since I’m using a residential cable modem, I can’t actually send or receive mail directly with that server (many incoming SMTP servers these days reject mail from dynamic IPs, and my provider wouldn’t be happy if I opened incoming port 25 to the world). So I use a “real” remote SMTP server on a fixed IP elsewhere which relays incoming and outgoing mail to my personal server.
The problem is, I never configured my remote server to know all the valid destination addresses for my personal domain, so it just forwarded them all on. Which meant that when my local server bounced the 90% of them that are spam due to invalid addresses, my remote server was generating bounce messages for them and sending them to the “from” address.
Of course, “from” addresses on spam are never correct, and sending bounce messages for non-local addresses apparently went out of style with Vanilla Ice. So for the past several years I’ve been sending backscatter for all those spams I get.
So, here’s my apology to the internet for being the proverbial “part of the problem”. I’ve quit sending those bounce messages now.
