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Someone *is* playing with us. One likely explanation is that a spammer is reading nanog and is showing his/her/its displeasure with the anti-spam tone on this list recently.

This sort of revenge is very common among spammers, in my first-hand experience. Block a spammer from your site and shortly thereafter various malicious things begin happening with disturbing frequency.

Unfortuntely the same can be said about some anti-spammers today (while there are several honorable exceptions) as I can testify from an on-going breakin by a juvenile. Feel free to email me if you want an example or like to help. These anti-spammer hackers are lower scums than all the spammers I've encountered. The spammers have never destroyed information (yet). And we are not even close to being spammer friendly. Isn't it always easy to generalize and find scapegoats instead of treating every case as unique?