any way to combat spam floods aimed at my domain name?

I'm getting 3000 e-mails a day now - augh!

[stapel]

We all have had to deal with "[e-mail]" being used as the faked "From" address in spams, so that we have to deal with the bounces from invalid e-mail addresses. But now one of my sites has drawn the attention of the spammers. (It's gotten big enough? Lucky me.) They're directing hundreds of messages a day to a long list of e-mail addresses that have never existed. (That is to say, these e-mail addresses were never harvested from anywhere; they were invented from whole cloth.) I'll get floods of spam e-mails with the "To" fields being something like:

[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail],
[e-mail]

...and so forth. And the floods contain hundreds of these messages, many with a dozen recipients each, with the "To" list slowly working through the alphabet. It's like they've wedded an AOL username list with my domain name, and they're just hoping some of the messages get through to valid boxes.

I'm using MailWasher to intercept my messages. (Thank heavens I don't have to actually download these messages before deleting them.) But I was wondering if there were maybe a better or perhaps just an additional way of dealing with this, short of changing to a different domain name (something I don't want to do).

Thank you.

Eliz.

[Sanenet]

Switch off your "catchall" email address. This will cause them to bounce. Or, just send them all into a user account and periodically delete them.

[stapel]

Thank you for your reply.

I'd previously set up a few accounts (for my husband, my sister, my kid, etc) that were username-specific, but I'd had all other mail (including all my mail) go to the default address. I've created a new account using my desired username, so the [e-mail] messages are the only ones landing in the default box.

I still have just as many e-mails to delete, but it's sure a lot easier now that they're sorted better.

Thank you.

Eliz.

[dhatz]

This is called "Joe Job" (google for it)

Ie someone is using your domain to create thousands of fake From: senders to send his spam.

COnsider youself very lucky if you get just 3000 return mails/day, I get & dilter 3000 of spam mails every day!

Last time a "joe job" happened to one of my domains (I had the same happen in previous years, but at a very small case like yours), the spammers must MANY mails spoofing my domain.

Still I was lucky enough that they used a specific hostname which I had rarely used since 1998, e.g. to make an example

[e-mail]

I had to CANCEL the host "hostname" which as I said fortunately wasn't one of the used names (e.g. www.domain.tld, mail.domain.tld, domain.tld etc) at the DNS level. So that the mailservers would junk the mail without contacting us via SMTP.

Until the DNS changes propagated (12 hours) through all the hosts that had queued return mail to us, we still received and junked (at SMTP level) about 800.000 bounced emails.

It was effectively a Denial-of-Service attack for us, as throttling kicked in etc and severely affected inbound traffic

The next day I implemented SPF for all the domains I've access on. And will implement the other methods proposed by Yahoo and M$ as well, when they finalize them.

Hope this helps.

Dimitris

[stapel]

I'm sorry; I meant to say that I am receiving these spam messages directed to my domain, not spoofed from my domain. I've been dealing with the spoofing for some time now, and that only results in a few dozen "bounce" messages a day.

Please clarify: what is this "SPF" that you implemented? I'm not familiar with this acronym. And how will Microsoft and/or Yahoo policies affect my account?

Thank you.

Eliz.

[wackal]

I had the same problem recently. spam was overwhelming my inbox and I had to devote more and more time to checking and deleting emails. I searched the forums here and someone recommended SpamBayes spam filter. it's open source and free and it has worked like a charm since I installed it.