A1 Web Server - A1 Web Server Help Desk

Question:
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I'm receiving bounced emails where somebody is using my website address and sending stuff out and it's bouncing back to me as bad mail.

Such as:

----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2006 9:21 AM
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
pat_jenn@projectpeople.com

Answer:
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Hi Sandy,

What you are most likely experiencing is the blowback from a spammer or virus infected computer spoofing your email address.

The good news is that your hosting account has not been compromised, and these emails are not being sent through our server.

What happens is that one of your acquaintances gets a virus on their computer.

The virus wants to replicate itself, or maybe just send spam, so it sends an email to everyone in the infected computer's address book. To make it more likely for the emails to be opened, the virus picks one name in the address book, and makes it appear that all the emails were sent from that address.

In this case, it chose your address.

Although the emails didn't really come from you, if they can't be delivered, they will be returned to you. This is a real bummer, I know.

Infuriating as this is, there's nothing we can do at the server level because the security hole isn't with us, but with the smtp protocol, and effects everyone on the net. Because the emails are from another servers POSTMASTER, our mail server software is required to deliver the message, and bypasses any server side filters you set up.

There is very little we can do on the server side, but you can do quite a bit on your own computer to stop these emails.

The best strategy is to set up a series of message rules (filters) in Outlook which discards any message from POSTMASTER or MAILER-DAEMON. For help on setting up message rules, please read the following tutorial:

http://www.sitedeveloper.ws/tutorials/spam.htm

Another solution we can offer is to set you up with a Postini account. This filters all email BEFORE it reaches our servers, and will filter out these undeliverables. We charge $7.50 per month per email address for this service.

Larry