Spoofed?

[Tonearm]

Over the last couple of days I've been getting tons of "returned mail" sent from [e-mail]. Is there anything I can do about this? This doesn't mean anyone has control of my email server does it?

[jdMorgan]

Maybe, maybe not. If it's a spoof, no. If someone's hacked into your cgi-email or sendmail, then yes.

Ask your hosting company if they can see any indication that this could have happened. They might be able to tell, and the question will serve as notice to them that you may have been spoofed and are acting in good faith.

If you've been spoofed, there's not much you can do to stop it, outside of taking legal steps if you can track them down. Otherwise, about all you can do is to forward the bounces to [e-mail].

Jim

[jomaxx]

Some of the bounces will have the IP address the message was originally received from.

[PatrickDeese]

don't forget there are a ton of viruses that are currently active that spoof the sender field.

i deleted about 50 "failure delivery" emails today.

[adfree]

I just found this spam filter program that asks a challenge question to the sender (just once) for validity.
Stopped all spam for me.

[Tonearm]

Alright, thanks for all the advice guys. I'm going to ask my host to check it out.

[TheDoctor]

I just found this spam filter program that asks a challenge question to the sender (just once) for validity.

Sounds like the one that challenged me when I sent out some (opt-in) mail this last week.

What happens is that you get a bounce back with a URL. The URL takes you to a page with a number as image, you have to enter the number.

It says that, once you've proved you exist, it puts you on a white list. Seems much better than all those spam filters that prevent people getting what they've opted to receive.

[Tropical Island]

The challenge system may be OK for personal mail but isn't practical for a business that depends on e-mail queries to survive.

With lots of competition if we don't give a timely answer to the e-mail inquiries the potential cutomers would just go to our competitors. If they had to go through an extra step many wouldn't.

[vrtlw]

I've been using a combination of challenge/response and a bayesian filter.

Basically if the bayesian filter detects it is possible SPAM it forwards the email onto the challenge/response system. I have trained the bayesian system with many thousands of emails and it rarely identifies non-spam as spam.

The main traffic that hits the challenge/response system is requests for link exchanges. I am currently experiencing very little SPAM in my inbox and very few challenges are issued to Non-SPAM senders. This to me is a satisfactory solution.