Spam emails from my domain...

[Russ]

Hi

I hope someone can help me out here and tell me how it is possible that someone has been sending spam emails from my domain. Lots of the emails bounce back (approx 200 per day!) and all appear to have been sent from such and such a name @appointdirect.com the emails are all the cheap software type. I get enough Viagra and cheap software emails to know how annoying this is and am worried that it could have a detremental affect on my bussiness or possibly black list me in some way?

Is there anything I can do to stop this? I have a my server world package with webfusion... Also, is there any way I can stop or reduce the amount of crap I receive?

Any help appreciated

Russ

P.S Sorry if this has already been covered...

[mattk]

It's easy to spoof someone's email address so it looks like an email is being sent from them when in fact it's coming from a completely different source.

I would contact your hosting company just to make sure that no emails are being sent from your account (unlikely), it's more likely that some cheeky monkey is sending them from somewhere in Korea and just using your address.

You can view the headers of the original email - this may give you some idea of where they are originating from.

[mark_hadfield]

/\ What he said.

Check with the hosting company, update your anti-virus files and do a full system scan. If both are negative - the chances are the addresses are spoofed.

I often get emails from mark.hadfield offering myself viagra! Good rates though... alledgedly!

[dan.field@clearmymail.com]

Unfortunately, as Matt has already said, an e-mail address can be very easily forged.

Just about all spammers will use someone elses e-mail address for the return address. That way they don't have to suffer all of the bounce back!

One other big cause of these invalid bounce backs is from a virus, but probably not on your machine. There are virus about that will infect someones machines and read through their address book and any e-mails they have in outlook... the virus will then send out from the infected machine with a return address of one of these contacts it has found.

So chances are, if you are not infected then it is someone that you have e-mailed in the past who is infected!

There are a few new technologies being tested at the moment which will help mail servers validate a senders e-mail address, which would then stop them sending the bounce-backs to the incorrect address. The main one that seems to have a few good ideas (But also has some major problems to address) is called SPF (Sender Policy Framework).

We do have some short guides about spam and how they get hold of your address, these are available at http://www.clearmymail.com/spam_guides.aspx

Dan Field
ClearMyMail Ltd.
dan.field@clearmymail.com

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[Mac Yeti]

Check the headers (or post a couple up here), and you can see the IP address it origintated from - if it's all the same IP you can contact whoever owns it (most likely a small business with an open relay), and then tell them they need to sort out their firewall/mailserver :)