someone is using my email address in "reply to" field

[Sysman]

It used to happen a lot with my account - spam machines would use a random string of letters and my domain name at the end to mail out loads of stuff. Occasionally I'd get very irate comments left on my website about how evil I was for spamming people, and I'd have to explain that if you look at what has happened, it's nothing to do with me.

There was a sudden outbreak of this about 10 years ago. I was the not so lucky recipient of multiple copies of an irate message from an Italian website, obviously generated by a spam rule they had.

That's how I learned that bouncing messages isn't a good idea. You just annoy innocent victims .

[Pondlife]

It all seems to have gone quiet since the 29th. Ta all.

[MicrosoftBob]

As a starter change your password for your email account just incase

[NickFitz]

How's this turned out for you? Has it subsided yet?

[Pondlife]

Cheers all.

[TheFaQQer]

I switched on SPF and digitally sign all my emails now to show where they came from.

It used to happen a lot with my account - spam machines would use a random string of letters and my domain name at the end to mail out loads of stuff. Occasionally I'd get very irate comments left on my website about how evil I was for spamming people, and I'd have to explain that if you look at what has happened, it's nothing to do with me.

If I had plenty of teenage Russian sluts working for me, do you think I'd be here all day???

[Contreras]

or spoofing the "sent from" bit as I've got about 1K of mailer daemon failure notices.

I've checked on the email server and there's no record of them being sent via the account and since it's my proper email account this is a tad annoying.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

TIA

Pondy

This is what SPF is designed to prevent. It does however require that you have control over DNS records for the domain and is only effective in so far as the ISPs and mail services may decide to honour it. I have set up SPF records on my domains but interestingly the wiki article suggests that these have been abandoned and I should now be using TXT records instead.

[NickFitz]

The few times this has happened to me, it didn't last more than a couple of days.

[Pondlife]

Does your domain have a catch all address? If so turn it off, other than that there is not a lot that can be done, annoying but not the end of the world

That would have been the first option had they not been using my actual email address. This is what's annoying as I don't want to bin the address.

[SimonMac]

or spoofing the "sent from" bit as I've got about 1K of mailer daemon failure notices.

I've checked on the email server and there's no record of them being sent via the account and since it's my proper email account this is a tad annoying.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

TIA

Pondy

Does your domain have a catch all address? If so turn it off, other than that there is not a lot that can be done, annoying but not the end of the world

[Pondlife]

or spoofing the "sent from" bit as I've got about 1K of mailer daemon failure notices.

I've checked on the email server and there's no record of them being sent via the account and since it's my proper email account this is a tad annoying.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

TIA

Pondy