Last night, a plethora of emails had been sent to email accounts around the world. Last night was the night of the Lunar Eclipse. NASA posted a page where you can email the story "Lunar Eclipse" to a friend. What is worse is that you have to specify the senders email with it, and the sender will be sent a courtesy copy. So an easy idea would be to send an email(s) to a friend or a valid email account and put the same email as the sender, effectively sending x2 copies of the story to the same email accounts. When the users checks his or her's email they'll see emails sent to them, from them. Also a more thoughtful spammer would put two valid email address's in the sender and receiver fields sending spam emails to both accounts simultaneously.

The more inclined users might check the headers of the spam emails but would only find that they originated from NASA! So he or she them might filter based on sender but then the spammer would just change the sender email.

I was surprised to see that my inbox(s) had no more room. Ouch! The spammer could simply write an SMTP script, use gcurl or simply refresh, refresh and refresh some more to repeatedly send massive amounts of emails. I can only hope the spammer(s) refresh button(s) get broken.

NASA - Send the story to a friend: http://science.nasa.gov/programs/mail/sendfriend.asp

Ouch indeed.