Unauthorized use of our site's email address

elaurvick · #1 (**permalink**) 05-01-2007, 06:59 PM

I'm not sure which forum this belongs in . . .

We are getting emails with the subject "Mail delivery failure" from MAILER-DAEMON@nl.demon.net. For a while, we got about 20 a day, it has now dropped down to about one a week. The most recent was sent by "camon Freese <Freeserbhfl@ame4u.com>". We receive these because of the extension.

"Sales@ame4u.com" and "Webmaster@ame4u.com" are the only email addresses we have set up. The hosting server is secure and we have not had any problems with the site. Our host's technical support says these emails are NOT being sent from inside our site. The only ones we know about are the ones that do not get delivered. My guess is someone pulled the extension off our site's "Contact Us" page and created a bogus email address to send out spam.

Has anyone else had this happen to them? Is there any way to stop it?

arbie · #2 (**permalink**) 05-01-2007, 07:18 PM

I used to get the odd one of these when I looked after another site. It was explained to me as spoofing rather than using your mailgateway.

Random genrate the first bit and strap it to @yourdomain and you have a spoof email address to stick into any bulk sender. The recipient who reports will often report it to your ISP rather than the actual header ISP keeping the heat off the spammer for a while.

If there is a link in the spammer's email then they couldn't care less that no-one can email them back because the email doesn't exist. They still get paid their .02 to send that particular email.

hostBrain · #3 (**permalink**) 05-05-2007, 02:33 AM

Those email addresses are just faked in the headers.
Nothing you can really do about it, unfortunately

edhan · #4 (**permalink**) 09-28-2007, 07:40 AM

I used to have that sort of emails and also receiving from receivers asking me to stop sending them spam emails.

But since I am not doing it, I can't do anything even though they said they will report me to the ISP.

Seems impossible to stop this from happening.