virus e-mails

[brijay]

Hi Have had my site up and running for approx 10 months now, and as it grows so do the amount of attempted virus e-mails coming to me. As I have good anti-virus software these are picked up for me but i still find it rather frustrating. I have a few questions in relation to this.
1. How do I stop these!?

2. Some of these e-mails come through stating they are from my own domain ie '[e-mail]' when I know this is impossible as I have never created an account of this name. I have found where I can add addresses to a reject list on the mail server but I cant block this domain as it is my own! Also many say they are hotmail accounts so I really dont want to block that domain as potential customers may also have hotmail accounts! How does this work. There is an IP address in the properties section of the e-mail that come through, if I use this will this be the real IP address where the e-mails are coming from? Also if I receive these bogus e-mails such as described above does that mean that others will be receiving them thinking they are from my domian name? Hope this makes sense :)

Any advice is appreciated

Brijay

[MattyMoose]

1. How do I stop these!?

You don't. You just live with it. :)
To save yourself some money for licenses on AV scanning software, you could look at server-based message scanning (using home-grown solutions, or whatever -- check with your host, they may have an offering), there are also 3rd party providers that will scan email for you (you send all your incoming mail to them, they scan, and then forward to you). There are privacy implications of doing this, though, so be careful! :)

2. ...

Seriously, don't bother. There's no point in you straining yourself to block thousands upon thousands of email addresses or IP addresses. I used to do this, and I occasionally still do, when I encounter someone who floods our email server, but for the most part, I just let our scanners do their jobs, and deal with it.

What you're seeing is most likely a spoofed sender address... It's quite trivial to do, and spammers will cycle through spoofed usernames and domains as the sender's address. I often get bounce-backs to my inbox from an AV scanner out there, saying I sent a virus, but in fact it was a spoofed from: address. It could come up that occassionally someone will pick your domain name to spoof from, but I find that goes in fits and spurts. months without anything, and then suddenly a buch of bounces.

In general, no biggie, nothing to worry about, just keep your antivirus systems up to date, and make frequent backups of all your vital data.

Any advice is appreciated

[richlowe]

I use spamcop.net to scan my emails and it works wonderfully. False positives low and it stops virtually all spam cold. I used to get 50,000 spam emails a month, now just a few dozen.

[brijay]

How frustrating I guess I was hoping for some simple solution. Guess I'll have to learn to live with it.

Thanks for advice/info

Brijay

[mack]

The biggest single thing you can do is make it as difficult as possible for your email addrsess to be harvested.

Many sites simply have a clickable link to email the webmaster. This can be very bad if the link is a standard mailto: link. This allows harvesting bots to gather your email address for the purpose of sending spam.

All we can do is try to make it as difficult for the spammers as possible. On all my sites I have resorted to using a feedback form as oposed to supplying an email address. The form details are then sent to my email address without the user ever knowing it. This has worked very well in my experience.

Mack.

[brijay]

Thanks Mack,
I will look into doing this, anything to try and reduce the spamming. Although it does come in spurts things have eased off again now :)

Thanks Brijay