(no subject)

[flemmings]

Anyone else getting hundreds of Returned Mail, Blocked Mail, and so on notifications? I think I must have about 700 today alone, after they sort of slacked off on the weekend. Again, it's an old email address that somebody must be doing automatic mailings with, and I've no idea how to stop it.

Comments

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

I haven't been hit any worse than usual?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Argh.

By the way, don't I owe you for server service, as of last month or so?

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Oh yes! With all else that has been going on I forgot!
Thank you for remembering. ^_^
Do you still have my address?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Yup. $20 or have I misremembered that as well?

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

I cannot recall but that price sounds fair to me!

A possible avenue

[(Anonymous)]

Technically, there is no way to prevent spammers from forging your address on their emails.

Also, many spam filters are reluctant to catch these sorts of ensuing notifications, because they have no way of telling whether the bounce back is from a legitimate email attempt or not.

Instead, folks are looking at ways to help mail servers guess when someone is using a forged address. One of the more popular attempts is something called SPF (Sender Policy Framework). It works sort of like this:

* whoever hosts your email sets up some magic on their end which tells the world that they are doing this SPF thing, and that any message which claims to be from you had better be sent through XYZ server.

* when somebody else receives a message which appears to be from you (assuming they are also doing SPF), they will do a quick check to see if the incoming message was actually sent by XYZ server. If it was, then they'll assume the message is legitimate and accept it. If it wasn't, they will refuse it without bouncing an error back to the From address.

Barring the unlikely event that a spammer who is forging your address is also sending through the same server as you, this should drastically cut down on the number of bounce backs you get.

Whether or not your hosting provider can/will enable SPF for you depends entirely on their set up, of course. It has to be enabled at the domain level (i.e., not just for one particular email address), so if you aren't using your own domain name for your email address, then that may be a limiting factor.

If your system administrator is open to the idea, but hasn't looked at SPF yet, you can direct them to this link: http://www.openspf.org/


--
Steph

Re: A possible avenue

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Yeah, part of the trouble is that it's a previous domain name, but the domain is no longer in existence. I shall have to brave the labyrinthine phone menues of the giant that took over my little local server and see if they can do anything. I doubt it- they want me to change my current email to their domain name and I don't want to.