Email Spoofing

Any way to stop it?

[Visit Thailand]

For some reason there has been a lot of email spoofing going on with one of our domains especially.

People sending out spam that is seemingly from our domain name but not from any email address that actually exists.

It is not done through formmail or such so I am unsure how I can stop this.

I know that there is a lot of returned email from spoofed virus emails still but some of these seem to be genuine spam.

Has anyone else seen a very large upturn in returned virus spoofed emails? and is there any way you can stop someone from spoofing your domain to send out spam?

[Mardi_Gras]

>Has anyone else seen a very large upturn in returned virus spoofed emails?

Yes.

>is there any way you can stop someone from spoofing your domain to send out spam?

No.

[Visit Thailand]

Great that is what I feared mardi_gras

This new beagle virus seems to be quite widespread, and we have been receiving quite a few complaints from people that do not understand what spoofing is.

I guess we need to try and educate our viewers and the public in general a little more about spoofing.

[Sari]

I've also have been getting a large amount of spoofing on my domain in the last month or so. You may want to consider locking down your catch-all (default) email account so that the bounced emails aren't clogging up your inbox. You can also get it up so that it bounces with the message: "no such address". I've found that this has cut down significantly on the clutter in my inbox.

Keep in mind, this will only help if they are using fictious names at your domain.

I personally have found this very frustrating. I don't know about you, but I've worked really hard to develop a reputable company name, and to now have someone use it to send out spam really ticks me off! But my host agrees, that there is no way to track these people down.

Good Luck!

[Tropical Island]

It really is a huge problem that needs to be fixed.

We get 1 or 2 valid e-mails a day that are mispelled or misdirected in our catch-all. The downside is we have to deal with 100's of returned spoofed e-mails and spam.

[Sari]

That's a good point Tropical Island. Personally, I haven't had that experience with misspelled emails. I guess people need to weigh how valuable those 1-2 misspelled emails a day are compared to the time taken every day to sort through the "junk".

[Tropical Island]

One e-mail has the potential of 100's of dollars. I would guess that over the course of a year it could be thousands.

Certainly worth the time to read through the subject lines to sort them out.

I put 50 e-mails to a page and can go through 100 in about 3 minutes. Because of our filters some newsletters also end up in the junk pile because of words in the subject line so I also find those.

[raywood]

It seems to me that I get a lot of these that are not really bounced. They are just original messages addressed to me or to postmaster. They never started in my smtp server.

It's a ploy to get your attention and get you to open the message. I've deleted them all, and I don't remember the exact contents, but I think they may have some kind of virus attached or something. When I get another one I'll look at the header and post what I find.

ray

[raywood]

Is this what the Bagel virus does?
ray

[troels nybo nielsen]

Not sure, Ray, but there is one virus that fakes to be a bounce.

Yes, Visit Thailand, it may be a question about educating your visitors. In the last couple of months I have spent quite a bit of time reporting spam to spamcop. And it actually seems to work. That might be an option for your visitors.

[Visit Thailand]

Problem with SpamCop is that for the average user they may not understand spoofing and end up submitting my domain to SpamCop.

Must admit that this is the most annoying part of spam for me. I do not mind deleting rubbish and loads of it each day but I do mind my domain name(s) being potentially tarnished in reputation.