Good morning,
About 18 months ago my wife and I started a small on-line business hosted by Yahoo with two e-mail addresses for it (one for customer service the other for info).
A few months ago we started receiving mail delivery system e-mails informing us that it was “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender”. The only thing is that we had not sent any of these out! Someone had added a few letters, letters and or numbers, or a name in front of our domain name and sending them out that way.
The mail mostly seems to be about the stock market and recommending tips. We contacted Yahoo but they informed us that there was nothing they could do as it was not related to a store problem. We tried other sources but the general opinion was that there was very little we could do.
A relative heard of our problem and sent us your URL for he uses a code from you that he added to his website.Would this be of use to us or is it too late now that these people have started sending out?
Thank you for any help you can give us.
Regards
BD
The tool we offer on AuditMyPC.com is for tricking the spam bots into populating their database with junk email addresses. It makes it difficult for spammers to sell their database because the person buying it will discover invalid addresses.
As for your errors, if you can PM me a copy of the message, I’ll be able to tell you exactly what is going on and why you are receiving them.
Regards,
Jim.
The very same thing has been happening to me recently. I’ve been receiving 100s of returned emails that someone has been sending out using a phony email address as if it were originating from my domain. For example: the address that it looks like sent the original email might be something like……… fcrdt@mysite.com …….or any other combination of letters or numbers.
I contacted my host and they told me that someone is just sending them out to hassle me. They assured me that those emails are not originating from my hosts server or sendmail program.
I’m sending you a copy in PM, AMPC, of one of those returned emails.
Thanks,
Steve
Awesome question Steve!
I would not worry too much about this type of spam and here is why.
These messages you’re receiving are much like a poor man’s method of sending mail. The poor man writes a letter and addresses it to a fictitious address and places the person’s name and address he wants it delivered to in the from address (top left).
He then puts the letter in a public mailbox without a stamp. No stamp, so the mail carriers sends it back to the sender, which is really the person the poor man wanted it to go to in the first place.
The spam (bounced email) you are receiving is a lot like this. Here is how it works.
The spammer sends an email to a real mail server (could be a server at any company). It may contain an attachment (virus, sales pitch, etc)
The spammer modifies the email so that the sender’s information appears to be your email address
The message is addressed to a person that does not exist at the company having the mail server.
The mail server sees there is no such email address and sends (bounces) the email back to the sender (you) with a notice that it can’t be delivered.
You open the spam wondering what you sent and see a sales pitch of some type or worse, a virus attachment.
A solution to this would be to have companies with email servers verify the from address before bouncing an email back to the sender.
Tricky, and they are always thinking up more ways to beat the system. I have a trick of my own for the spammers; it’s called anti spam.
So, don’t worry too much about the spam, you didn’t send anything out but rather a mail server was used to sent you spam.
Hope that helps to clear things up.
Regards,
Jim.
I get those type of messages also from time to time, it is very annonying because they seem so legitimate.
Just a quick note on this issue. Sometimes those "free" contact web forms that you can download for php, asp, or perl, etc are full of known security problems. Spammers can use these forms and "hijack" them to send out spam messags. So be really careful if you download a "contact" script or a "Tell a friend script". Just something to keep in mind…