Ever wonder just how much of a problem spam email is? To give you an idea, here in no particular order are the 1,231 IP addresses from which my email server received at least 3 messages sent to invalid addresses within a single 5 minute period over the course of 4 hours.

That sentence may have been a little hard to follow, so let me rephrase. For 4 hours, I had my email server keep track of each time it received an email to a non-existent email address (most likely a spammer trying to guess a valid email address). Every 5 minutes, a script would count how many such emails it had received from each IP address and log any that appeared 3 or more times, and then clear the list and start over.

This list does not include many thousands more IP addresses from which only 1 or 2 such messages were received.

If one of them is your IP address, either shame on you, you pathetic leach in human form, or your computer has been hacked and is being used to waste untold amounts of internet bandwidth. And in case you think it doesn't really matter, last month, for the first time, I had to pay extra for my hosting due to excessive bandwidth usage. The overage was caused by spam.

Here's the list of shame.

[Update: The list of shame has been removed because it's probably mostly full of IP addresses of servers bouncing spam with a spoofed sender address. I'll post most more rants about this problem later.]