Spaming Question

[Jayson Woodruff]

Is there a way to stop, or at least report someone using my owned domain name to spam people? I can't see there being a way to identify them. Worst part is I get all the bounce backs.

Jay W

[Aaron Goldsmith]

Nope. It's incredibly easy to fake the sending domain and the messages are often sent through systems that have been compromised and actually have nothing to do with the spammers.

One of the reasons I switched to having Google Apps host the email for all my domains, at least then I don't get the bounced spam messages and other sites aren't going to blacklist the google email servers ;)

[Bob Beamesderfer]

The hosting company doesn't have any answers?

[Stephen Yeoh]

If you have access to your DNS servers, you could set up SPF records as part of your DNS entry. That will stop some of the spam, but not all of it. This is FREE!

http://www.openspf.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Do you know if they are actually using your mail server to send or just pretending to use it?

It's really annoying, but at some point, they will move on to another senders domain and most of the bounces will stop.

[Jayson Woodruff]

Just pretending. I have the DNS through yahoo.

Jay W

Do you know if they are actually using your mail server to send or just pretending to use it?

[Marshall Grice]

it's highly annoying, but no I haven't found a way to stop it either. I followed Aaron's lead and switch to having google host my mail. The bounce back emails have been all but eliminated, along with all the other spam. Google's spam blocker ROCKS!

the part that is still very annoying is my domain is black listed pretty much everywhere so nobody gets any of my emails.

[Q V]

You can't eliminate it, but there's a couple small things you can do on your side:

- Install SpamAssassin, if available, on your server, then you can configure to something like this thread to eliminate most (if not all) of it: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/s ... ers/118391; there's other programs out there, but I personally like SpamAssassin the best. There are also a few links about BATV (Bounce Address Tag Validation) in the last post on that thread that may help.

- On the client side, you could potentially filter out these messages if they all have similar titles - of course, the drawback may be that you will not bouncebacks when you send mail to an invalid address if you make the filter too general

- Another thing to look into: which address are these bouncebacks getting sent to? perhaps your actual email address is a "catch-all" address; if the spammer is using an address that you don't check/use, you could filter all those out as well (either be separating that particular address to go directly to delete, or removing the catch-all property on your email address)

[Bob Beamesderfer]

it's highly annoying, but no I haven't found a way to stop it either. I followed Aaron's lead and switch to having google host my mail. The bounce back emails have been all but eliminated, along with all the other spam. Google's spam blocker ROCKS!

the part that is still very annoying is my domain is black listed pretty much everywhere so nobody gets any of my emails.

Yahoo's spam blocker is a bit dumb [ATT and other related providers use Yahoo's mail servers]. One day it allows a message through, the next day that sender's message goes to spam. Because of that I switched to SpamSieve as an add-on to Thunderbird. But that's all on the receiving end.

Preventing the spoofing isn't something I've dealt with yet. Hoping for never. The e-mail addresses I have connected to my blog's domain go to a Web-based system instead of my two primary addresses. So far, nothing. :gpower: