Someone using email addresses set up from my domain name!

JennyP

I have my own domain name with only one email address set up on it but a forwarding thing so I get emails addressed to anything@mydomain.co.uk.
If that makes sense.
Recently I started getting masses of emails that were either "out of office" messages or message undeliverable. They all seemed to be in response to emails sent from other email addresses with mydomain.co.uk at the end e.g. 67gjg00s2@mydomain.co.uk. I reckon I've had about 1000 of these messages. There seem to be several different email accounts set up.
I've logged into my control panel and no other email accounts show up as having been set up that way.
I've contacted my hosting provider. They said just change the password on the control panel and it will eventually stop.
I don't see how that will stop it - I mean, if someone has already set up these email accounts somehow, they will still have access to using them.
Any ideas?
How did the person manage it in the first place?
How come the email addresses don't show in my control panel as existing?
How can I delete them and stop people being offered Rolex watches, viagra and heaven knows what else, seemingly from a website associated with me?
All ideas and help very much appreciated!

macman

Probably just address spoofing, which you can do nothing about.

spannerzone

I get the same thing, I rely on my email's spam facility but the 30 a day I get is a pain as occasionally I get a genuine email lost amongst the spam.

JennyP

What is address spoofing?
You mean, someone is actually able to use my domain name and send spoof emails from it and I can't do anything?

JJ_Egan

JennyP wrote: »

What is address spoofing?
You mean, someone is actually able to use my domain name and send spoof emails from it and I can't do anything?

Pretending to come from xx address but not coming from xx address .
Real send address is hidden .
If the mail is actually from your domain contact your domain .

jje

JennyP

OK. I have just googled it too and also it says that there's not much I can do!
Bummer! I just feel it makes me look bad!
And it annoys me! I would like it stopped.

paddyrg

Spoofed junk mail 'from' your domain, you're seeing the bounces. One morning I had 30,000 bounce responses when some **** spoofed my domain for their 'from' address.

Nothing you can do.

JennyP

How incredibly annoying! But thank you for all the responses. At least I know I can just stop worrying about it! There's no point is there if I can't do anything?

securityguy

JennyP wrote: »

OK. I have just googled it too and also it says that there's not much I can do!
Bummer! I just feel it makes me look bad!
And it annoys me! I would like it stopped.

You could investigate having the people who are managing your domain for you add SPF records for your domain, or you could possibly even convince them to offer DKIM. The former nominates which servers can send mail, and the latter provides a stronger, cryptographic proof that the mail is genuine. A lot of major mail providers (Google, Yahoo, MessageLabs, etc) check these, and simply discard mail which fails the check. I run my private domains myself (ie they are hosted on my own machines in data centres) and since I started using SPF and DKIM the rate of "backscatter" I see --- the shrapnel from people spoofing my domains --- has dropped to close to zero. However, if the domain came from CheapNamesRUs for three quid a year, it's unlikely they're going to do this for you.

paddyrg wrote: »

Spoofed junk mail 'from' your domain, you're seeing the bounces. One morning I had 30,000 bounce responses when some **** spoofed my domain for their 'from' address.

Nothing you can do.

There is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dkim

both as part of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

But if the people hosting the domain for you don't want to offer these services, you're out of luck.

paddyrg

Thanks Securityguy - glad to see moves are afoot to try to improve things. Certainly nothing like that existed when it first happened to me, but we are talking 1999 here!