Spammers using my email domain!

StockportGerbil

Hi!
My email address is getting flooded out with non-delivery reports as spammers appear to be sending out email which appears to come from my domain. So when they send that spam to a non existent email address or one with spam filtering then I get the non-delivery report and it's driving me potty!
Is there anyway of filtering out this stuff or better still getting the spammers to stop using my address?
Thanks
Kevin

theboylard

Hi,

unlikely they are actually using your domain, they are probably just spoofing (forging) the from/sender address and so it gets bounced back to you.
Do you actually have your own domain? If so you should have been provided with access to a control panel.
Log into that and you might find an option to send all unrouted mail to somewhere, usually your primary or default email address on the domain.
You should be able to change that to blackhole or bounceback - blackhole means it disappears into a ... and bounceback does just that.
Don't use bounceback, you would just be compounding the level of unneccessary traffic and your host probably wouldn't like you for it!
Use blackhole instead and that should get most of the rubbish sorted.

Secondly, use a mail client that has filters that actually work - suggest Mozilla's Thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Don't import anything on initial set-up, read the help files and that should save you 98% of the pain.

hapless

theboylard

If you are interested, post the full header from one of these emails (hiding your domain so that it doesn't get spammed) and I'll show you how to find out where the crap comes from - majority of the time though it's some poor soul who's pc has been hijacked and is part of a spambot network and they don't even know it.

hapless

timberflake

I had this problem a few years back. I kept getting 100's of delivery failures each day. Turns out there must have been a worm of something installed on my PC, I formatted my drive and reinstalled XP and it solved the problem so you may want to give it a go

cwoodham

There's another thread going at the moment here which would be worth reading and will give you some ideas how to deal with it.

StockportGerbil

Folks :-
Thanks for the suggestions.

I don't think it's a worm the returned mail headers show it didn't come from my PC in the first place.

I've been happy to use outlook for some time - if this nonsense carries on for much longer I might try thunderbird though....

Thanks again

Kevin

zenmaster

theboylard wrote:

Secondly, use a mail client that has filters that actually work - suggest Mozilla's Thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Crap. Outlook's filters work perfectly well.

The problem in this situation is what do you filter on?

I have the same problem and the return address is always something like fzjju@domain.com so filtering by address won't work.

I have filtered on subject containing phrases like "undelivered mail". I can't remember exactly what I used but 3 or 4 such phrases got rid of 80% of the junk and I shall refine it over time.

ivavoucher

theboylard wrote:

Hi,
Use blackhole instead and that should get most of the rubbish sorted.

I think setting the default address to :fail: is much better.

heres why

http://configservers.com/free/fail.html

Biggles

I'm concerned that by letting my OE decide what is spam and what is not, I will miss genuine mail. I'd rather receive the spam and delete it myself.

I can't see the point of using the :fail: option on 'undelivered mail', as a) I would want to know if an email I had really sent had bounced; and b) all the real spam would only be bounced to the target's system, which was the one that rejected it in the first place (will such an email bounce backwards and forwards for ever? Who knows!).

theboylard

ivavoucher wrote:

I think setting the default address to :fail: is much better.

heres why

http://configservers.com/free/fail.html

Hadn't seen that before, thanks for the update. I'll change a couple of domains and watch what happens.

hapless