A short while ago, I wrote about how my megginson.com domain has suffered severe collateral damage from security flaws in Microsoft Outlook, even though I’ve never used the product and do not run Windows. Today, I noticed that my IP address had changed, and that I was not seeing the site (due to a stale DNS cache, I think). Here’s what my hosting service wrote in reply (with the name of my other domain XXX’d out):

The domain megginson.com is on a different IP than XXXXX.com. The site is working just fine; we had to move your site a few days ago to a dedicated IP due to the excessive email spamming that was still coming in that was targeting your A record rather than your MX record. You were averaging over 500,000 pieces of spam a day even after you moved your email offsite as a result of the A Record targeting. The move to a dedicated IP allowed us to block all port 25 traffic on that IP to augment the incoming spam.

Pay close attention to that. My DNS MX record does not point to this ISP (it points to a dedicated e-mail service); the hosting service has only the A record. Even the DNS A record is getting 500,000 hits a day on port 25 (!!!) — I’m afraid to ask what’s going to the MX IP address. Sometimes I feel more like I’m under a fullscale botnet attack than just a bunch of bounces from virus messages sent by infected Outlook machines with my return address.

Kudos to my current hosting service, javaservlethosting.com. They are a high-volume, low cost hosting site, and you would have expected them to dump me long ago (as several other, much more expensive ones have) instead of going to all this trouble and losing all this money to keep my site up. You never know where you’ll find true integrity in the business.