Message Board

Tracking Harvesters/Spammers

Spammer with wrong header

Author: S.Eichhorst (8 Feb 09 11:39am)

Hello,

there is anywhere a Spambot who sends thousends of E-Mails every day, but changed the header with my Domain, the E-Mail-adress in the header does not exists, how could this happen?

My Domain is: www.blubbbel.de

The E-Mail has a From-header with "lineblubbbelmet@blubbbel.de" but this adress was never created from me.
in the last three days i received over 500 Mails from Deamon-Server they told me, the adresses doesn't exists..

Sorry, my english isn't very good, but I hope you can understand and help my.

Best regards,
S. Eichhorst

Re: Spammer with wrong header

Author: D.Poire (11 Feb 10 10:53am)

Mr. Eichhorst,

I realize this reply is over a year late. Hopefully I can at least shed some light for others.

I am rephrasing your question, "how could this happen" into "Why your domain name was picked"?

Spammers typically do not use correct return information. Using a valid domain name is best for them. How do the domain names get picked? Honestly, I have no idea. They may be randomly picked or somehow the domain name caught the attention of a spammer. I have a bunch of domains and get the mail for which there are no mailboxes. Only two of my domains every get these bounces. One hasn't received any for about 3 years. The other periodically gets bounces.

"Technically bounces are called non-delivery reports (NDR) or delivery status notifications (DSN)." These are to be delivered to the local recipient.

The false bounces are called Backscatter. "Backscatter is caused by (mail administrators) who don't reject mail during delivery, but instead accept the mail and then later send back a bounce message."

Check out these resources for more information (my quotes are from them):
http://www.backscatterer.org/
http://spamlinks.net/prevent-secure-backscatter.htm