Cyberpromo DOA

By: Daniel Macks
Original: "Charlie on the M. T. A." (Kingston Trio)

Well, let me tell you a story 'bout a piece of email
On a fine October day
It was loaded into packets which were sent from CyberPromo
Through a misconfigured relay.

But did it ever return? No it never returned,
And its fate is stiil unlearned (bye, Sannie!)
It may loop forever through the nets of AGIS,
It's the spam that never returned.

Oh it headed out of Philly and across the AGIS "backbone"
Bouncing off of several hijacked hosts.
But was it delivered? No! For procmail had blocked it
And that spam was already toast.

The spam turned back towards CP as with any other bounce
But that's when there arose a bug.
Scamfraud's 15 minute fame had come to a sudden end--
His provider had pulled the plug.

In normal situations, bounces do not cause much trouble
As they soon get delivered somewhere
But through a failed attempt to disguise all the spammage
The headers were in disrepair.

So the spam then bounced and bounced to all the forged addresses
But delivery would always stall
And thanks to IP blocking and other packet filtering
It was blocked at every firewall.

*SIGH* The spammer is long gone now, but his email keeps on hopping
'Tween the routers to and fro.
It's gained 10,000 megabytes of Received: header lines
When will it end? I just do not know.

Last update: 25 July 2003
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