About two weeks ago I started getting spam from Russia. But this isn’t your regular spam. This is spam returned by Russian mail transfer agents, with apologies, because it couldn’t be delivered:

(click on picture for bigger view):

I emptied my junk box this morning. I came home at about 4 p.m. today and took this picture. There are 2.2 MB of spams here. That’s 140 messages. I don’t have the faintest idea what they’re pitching. (How do you say “herbal viagra” or “hot stock tip” in Russian?) But these are the ones that are returned by the victims’ mailers. I shudder to think how many more get through on the far end, slandering my good name. (Like I know Russian! I don’t even know how to type Cyrillic letters. I was pleased that the out-of-box settings on the mac display them properly. (Consult image.))

I tried to set up a filter that examines email and dumps anything from .ru. It didn’t work. I don’t know why not. It’s a pretty simple RE ($From_header =~ /\.ru$/). Test messages are being discarded properly. Anyway, while my ISP’s tech support looks at that, I’m limited to simply making sure that anything from Russia is at least flagged as spam. But it will sure be nice when I can simply discard it instead of classifying it, downloading it, and then dumping it.