On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 09:16:39AM +0100, Anthony Campbell wrote: > Since last night my in-box is being filled up by dozens of bounced > messages. Evidently someone or something is spoofing my address and > sending out bogus messages.
This is referred to as a "joe job" (google for more info). In your case it is most likely not personal and is the result of a spammer randomly choosing your address for a massive spam run. In other cases, incredibly offensive email content is sent with someone else's address, so that they have to deal with the backlash. > I normally get a few of these and mark them as spam, but this is > ridiculous. Is there any way to stop it happening? The bounces mostly come because the spam is sent to an address list with a large number of local parts that don't exist. Poorly-designed email servers like Exchange or unpatched qmail will accept the spam, find they have no local part for it to be delivered to, and then are required by RFC to send a bounce back to the sender (your faked address). If all email servers in the world took a more sensible approach of working out their valid local parts during the SMTP conversation then they could reject with a 5xx code each one that was invalid. No bounce would then be generated. In the meantime, if you are really suffering, you can temporarily discard all emails from the null sender (<>), which should only be bounces. Note however that mails from the null sender are required to be accepted by RFC. Also note that it is best not to outright reject such emails as some sender verification schemes which connect back to your MX and probe with the null sender address may object, leading to your outgoing email being affected.
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