Frittering Away

I have recently, traumatically, decided to give up my old, beloved email address, for a spanking new gmail. I had my own domain; it spawned the name of this blog, and then others (well, one).

Alas, I have had to let it go for the simple reason that every hour I am getting something like a hundred delivery failure notices, all responding to accounts along the lines of gethairyjim@gracegoesabroad.co.uk. It has utterly paralysed my old account. Which makes me very sad indeed. It seems like a watershed; I am still going abroad, yet somehow I have to relinquish my symbolic statement. Now, I'm just like everyone else, not obviously linked to Blighty, with my metropolitan and ubiquitous gmail.

Apparently this sort of problem is due to email spoofing, whereby someone latches onto your domain and writes a programme that sends out hundreds of emails "appearing" to be from your account. According to my ever helpful host company, that's just something every internet user must bear, because the hackers are so much cleverer than the good guys and no one knows how to combat it.

What I honestly don't want to understand is why someone would write a programme that would annihilate someone's system like this; I can't see how it's for monetary gain which - have I been in the cradle of capitalism too long? - I would understand. It's the sheer maliciousness behind it that takes my breath away, because all it does is attempts to make your life difficult and miserable, which it has done.