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Newbie/Basic Questions

My web-site has been spoofed for spam

Author: H.Gardner2 (15 Apr 09 4:51am)

I'm receiving lots of rejection emails from other sites at my email address. All of these reference my web-site address, which seem to have been 'spoofed' by the spammers. Is there anything I can do?

Thanks

Post Edited (15 Apr 09 4:51am)

Re: My web-site has been spoofed for spam

Author: A.Degives Mas (15 Apr 09 5:15pm)

Directly, no. By the way, it's a very old nuisance, referred to commonly as a "joe job" where a forged domain / email address is used as a (phony) sender of the spam; typically you end up on the receiving end of "scatter-back spam" - the error notices of (typically) legit mail servers that report back that the spam message for the intended email address is rejected. It's mystifying why mail servers are so sloppy, and don't inspect the spam message (to identify it as such, so as to stop wasting their CPU cycles and bandwidth around the Net) but that's just the way it is - little to do about that. After all the real culprit behind the nuisance is the spammer; it's just immensely aggravated by misguided do-goody types who refuse (or simply are too incompetent) to deal properly with spam, namely by routing it to /dev/null (the trash bin) without sending out annoying and erroneous "error" messages.

Not only that, those IMHO misconfigured receiving mail servers are lending themselves to being used as a spam vector themselves, as YOU end up with the crud. So, AFAIC those mail servers are part of the spam problem.

Indirectly, however, you could submit those "error messages" to a (free) service such as KujOn (that's "no junk" spelled backwards) at www.knujon.com - it doesn't stop them, but if there's a pattern, their registrar receives a notification to cease and desist, with ultimately a request to SHUT DOWN the domain. Boom - end of the story: spamvertised sites are taken off-line, and persistent mail servers are drop-kicked off the net, too.

If you're a real gem, you could contribute to that service with a donation; KnujOn is a relatively small but VERY aggressive organization that deserves all the support it can get.

Pay 'em a visit and browse through the site: www.knujon.com

Otherwise, good luck suffering the Internet's fools...

Re: My web-site has been spoofed for spam

Author: A.E4 (27 Apr 09 1:40am)

Oh wow thanks for that link! I get so much spam that I had to stop using my server's email and switch to a new email address! Then I switched domain names (unrelated reasons) so now that spam has stopped but I sure could have used this link back at that time a few months ago! Thanks for letting us know about that link! I know I will use it now! :)

Re: My web-site has been spoofed for spam

Author: C.M9 (27 Jun 09 7:50pm)

Very vain I know, but i googled my domain name, and i find it on this site as a spammer... not from my actual ip address, but it's my .com as the apparent sender.

This is a result of a few seconds of frenzied ricocheting emails about 2 months ago, like HGardner described. use of javascript to insert my email address was to no avail.

I'm slightly curious as to why - unlike HGardner - the activity lasted really only a couple of seconds: it tailed off to maybe 1 'delivery failure' note per day. but more concerned about getting blocked or blacklisted or misunderstood.

Also, i looked at some of the email headers, and there seemed to be no pattern to them. I didn't find the ip address which this site flags up as the actual source...

What's it all about?? Just robot programmes let loose, harvesting, randomising, generating? Is there a human being involved somewhere?