Reply to: Hijacked Domain name for SPAM

[fridge]

a lot of this stuff is originating from robots. sad b******* they have nothing else to do all night

[autodial]

Dont display an email address on your website, only use photo format

[Ardesco]

Same happened to me. Unfortunately there isn't much you can do about it. Even more unfortunately it can have some knock-on effects. My domain got blacklisted by Microsoft - which meant I couldn't send emails to anyone on Hotmail or msn.com. Eventually, with the help of my ISP I got off the Microsoft blacklist - but its a right royal pain.

That shouldn't hapen unless you have an usecured server and tey are actually using your SMTP server to send the mail as well. Anybody with half a clue can have a look in the headers to find out where it originated and if the IP address doesn't match with your SMTP server it obviously hasn't come from you.

[martinb]

Same happened to me. Unfortunately there isn't much you can do about it. Even more unfortunately it can have some knock-on effects. My domain got blacklisted by Microsoft - which meant I couldn't send emails to anyone on Hotmail or msn.com. Eventually, with the help of my ISP I got off the Microsoft blacklist - but its a right royal pain.

[expat]

Hi,
Wonder if anyone can help.

A while ago I purchased a Domain name which was my surname, the company I used Easily give access to a basic webmail function, I've got 2 'personal' mail addresses and a 'catch all'.

Recently I've been getting a fair amount of mail which seems to be 'returned' from other companies, it looks like sombody is using the domain name + any letters before the @ to send spam.

I'm getting all the returns.

I don't want to stop the 'catch' all as I use some other e-mails such as 'sales@' and 'admin@' to recieve mail.

Is there anything I can do ?

I currenly use yahoo mail to pick up mail in work as they don't have Outlook and it keeps my mail off the office systems.

Thanks for any help forthcoming...

1. turn off the catchall, and set up your own addresses explicitly, even if you have to pay more for your hosting. Unfortunately that means that senders who mis-type your address won't get through.
2. and don't use sales or admin (or info or accounts) because spammers will use them. Unfortunately that means that your customers can't easily remember the address.
3. Get a Gmail account and forward your mail to that: its default spam filter is good. Set up "accounts" in Gmail to allow you to "reply from" the address
it was sent to.
4. As suggested, get your Spam filter to throw away Returned mail. Unfortunately that means that if you mist-type a destination address,m you won't be informed.

When someone sends email, they get to say who it is from without that claim being verified. Just like a letter.

[Perhentian]

36K emails

Well I had a catch-all on my domain name and some booger in China used my domain as the from address when spamming. I received 36,000 email bounce backs in one weekend from those emails that had delivery failures. Couldn't delete them quick enough....

I got rid of the catch-all very quickly!

[xoggoth]

Oddly enough I got a bit of spam about this problem the other day but deleted it unfortunately. There are those things same as you use to comment on blogs where you have to type in wiggly letters. Try a search on the net should turn it up. Also any email addresses displayed on your site should be images not in the html.

Also have a look at this
http://www.supanames.com/support/formmail.html

[PRC1964]

Me too.

Hopefully it'll all pass soon. For now, a few rules to clear out "Mail Delivery Failure" type emails seems to catch most of them.

[Sockpuppet]

Snap.

[meridian]

Yep, same here. Ironically I'm getting more returns from blocked spammers using my domain name than actual spam in either my domain address or my Hotmail address

[Spartacus]

Same is happening to me big time at the moment. Seems to come in waves though. The tide will subisde in a week or two.

[Pondlife]

IP Address

Ardesco,

How can I find out the IP address of the sender?

TIA

PL


Edit: Just found it in the header.

[Ardesco]

Nothing much you can do about it.

Create a mail account in your favourite e-mail application and you will see that you can manually set the reply to address and the address that mail appears to come from. Lots of scummy scammers use this ability to effectivly mask who mail has come from.

If you run your own e-mail server you can set up an SPF record so that only mail orgination from your domain passes the SPF check, but not everybody uses SPF validation and there are a lot of people that don't think it helps anyway.

I have had a snotty e-mail before telling me to eff off and not send any more spam. I sent a reply telling him to check the IP address that the mail came from in the e-mail header and to do an SPF check on it, all of which would prove that it didn't originate from me or my mail server and never heard anything back. no manners some people

[darmstadt]

Its just happening to me now as well and its a real pain in the derriere, bastards

[Bluebird]

Thanks for your help DP.