Decided to download the spam from my mailserver on localhost to my mail client so I can clean the mail server up and also take a look at some of the spam. They are getting quite clever now in how they avoid spamfilters. One I saw the other day used the fact that invalid html tags are ignored. So the spam contained a line such as “get y<hello>our ne<world>ws her<test>e” which would get past a spam filter looking for the words “get your news here”.
The problem is the download is sooooo slow – even from a connection to localhost. I am currently getting 1989 cps of a 10.32MB spambucket which it reckons will take another 59minutes! Disabling Norton’s antivirus increased the transfer rate to 2200cps, and disabling the firewall went to 2600 (and climbing – so i guess this is an average rate over time)
The interesting thing is that even with the Norton Antivirus AutoProtect option disabled, it still told me about two virus’s in the mailbox as I downloaded them. Someone is lying!