Shortly after launching a developed version of Bar.com I quickly noticed that the server itself was slowing down rapidly. It was working overtime... on something. The first thing I did was check some analytics to see just how much traffic the web site was getting. It was pretty normal. Then I checked some server logs and quickly realized the problem.
Do you know what foo or foobar means? I don't mean the college term relating to a state of drunkenness... that one's spelled a bit differently. It's kind of difficult to put into lay terms, but for our purposes here, it's a term programmers use when they're trying to communicate (via text) how a certain concept is conveyed through code (well, basically that's what it means... like I said, tough to explain).
Before I get back to foobar, let's talk about SPAM for a minute. Chances are that you've heard spam bots go out and search for email addresses on web pages so that they can spam the hell out of that address. Right? Okay, back to foobar...
As programmers are trying to communicate to on another over the Internet via forums, newsgroups, etc, they sometimes use the email address foo@bar.com to convey their concept. Google shows about 76,000 web pages that show that email address.
No wonder the server slowed down. It was getting an average of a few emails per second to that address. All, of course, were obvious spam. Imagine if your email address was plastered all over 76,000 web sites.
Post a comment
Sorry, comments are currently disabled.