Some tosspot has decided to send out a ton of spam emails advertising Viagra to the world, faking my domain as the return address.

This means my mailserver is currently having to fend off masses of bounce messages from other mailservers around the world that have rejected mail due to invalid email addresses, or messages telling me my email has been rejected by their spam filter because I've sent unsolicited commercial email.

I haven't!

Why can't sysadmins learn to disable bounce back messages for UCE? It should be perfectly obvious by now that the return addresses in UCE messages are never valid, and all that happens is some poor sod (me at the moment) gets flooded with erroneous messages.

Luckily, I control my own mail system at home using a combination of fetchmail, qmail, qmail-scanner, courier-imap, spamassassin and maildrop. So, for the time being all these bounce back messages are being directed to /dev/null - but I pity the poor computer illiterate sods who get hit with this crap and don't know what the hell to do about it.

But more to the point, why on earth should I have to jump through hoops just simply because some arsehole on another continent wants to flog some blue pills to idiots I've never met?

It hardly seems possible, but Zak was one year old yesterday.

The past year has flown by - it only feels like last week that he was a tiny helpless bundle, rather than the walking lump he is now!

Oh well, only four weeks to go and we'll have number three on the way! 

Seeing as I'm here in Israel, it would be a crime if I didn't go to see Jerusalem - so I went on a guided tour yesterday. Pictures from the trip can be found here:

http://gallery.edcourtenay.co.uk/albumListing.aspx?albumID=5&albumName=Jerusalem.

I've got my SmartMedia card reader hooked up, so I've started uploading some pictures from my trip here:

http://gallery.edcourtenay.co.uk/albumListing.aspx?albumID=4&albumName=Israel+Trip

It's the end of my first full day in Israel working with Panam on behalf of IS Solutions, and so far things are very enjoyable. The only fly in the ointment so far is I've yet to get net access for my laptop, and the systems here are firewalled off so I can't ssh to my linux box to collect my mail (I normally use mutt while I'm away). It's at times like this I realise just how dependant on email I've become for communication; it almost feels like I've lost a limb!

The flight to Tel Aviv was uneventful, save a mild bit of turbulence, and after yet more interrogation at the Passport office I was collected and driven to my hotel in Netanya.

Unfortuately I can't upload any pictures as yet (due to the aforementioned lack of net access for laptop), but the room is great. Well, it's not a room, it's a suite. Excellent; personally I'd have been fine with something a lot smaller, but I'm not complaining (and if anyone from the office is reading this, I ain't moving.... )