Comments on: My gmail address has been joe jobbed... solution?

Question: My gmail address has been joe jobbed... solution?

Manhasset — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:35:45 -0800

My Gmail account has been Joe Jobbed... anything I can do about it?

By: riffola

riffola — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:42:28 -0800

What's that in English?

By: Alison

Alison — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:45:04 -0800

I didn't know what Joe Jobbed meant, but I found out what it means on this page and several solutions. Basically, there is not much you can do, but contacting your ISP could keep you from being shut down.

By: riffola

riffola — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:52:39 -0800

There's hardly anyone out there whose domain has not been forged to send spam. That's why the domain blacklisting concept is really outdated. What are they going to do? Blacklist everyone?

There's not much anyone can do, as Alison said, contact your ISP/Host and let 'em know it wasn't you.

By: Emperor Yamamoto's Eggs

Emperor Yamamoto's Eggs — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:57:03 -0800

How bad is it? I get a few joe job messages a month on my gmail account; I just ignore them and nothing has ever happened. On the other hand, I used to run a community website in which my contact email address for the site was joe jobbed to death, I would get thousands of bounce messages per day. I contacted my hosting provider to explain, and they told me they already knew about the activity and they recognized that it was not originating from me, so they just put a filter on it and that was the last I heard. Hopefully, any ISP worth their salt will be able to tell that the origination point of the email is not you.

By: eriko

eriko — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:57:48 -0800

Not much. The good thing is that it is rather trivial to prove to a competent admin that you're innocent in the matter -- the header will plainly show that, unless your SMTP server does open relay (which means you don't have a competent admin.)

Alas, there are lots of incompetent admins, and far more people who simply don't know that there is a big difference in the "From" and "From:" fields in an email message, and while it's not that hard to fake From, it is *trivial* to fake From:, and that the real tell of where email came from is to walk the Received: headers -- you can add fake ones, but it is very hard to remove the real ones.

So, they believe the From: line, and either bounce to you, or flame you.

Best thing you can do is park the email address for a month, and then go pick through it. Unless you're being continually joejobbed, after a couple of weeks, the noise dies down.

By: Manhasset

Manhasset — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 09:00:49 -0800

I'm not concerned about my ISP. I own many domains and they've all been joe jobbed in the past. I had never heard of it happening to a gmail account before, though, and wondered if gmail perhaps had some way of nipping it in the bud were I to have a special contact address for them. Figured it was a long shot.

Thanks for the responses.

riffola, I figured if people didn't know what it was they wouldn't be able to help, so I didn't bother to explain.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 10:42:46 -0800

ugh, one of my domain names got Jo Jobbed. I thought I was being all smart by using wildcard email addresses so like 'asdf@mydomain' and 'quackquack@mydomain' all went to my inbox.

Then some spammer started sending fake emails from fake addresses at my domain. No longer could I simply drop emails that had come to an address lost to spammers. I had to deal with hundreds of mail dropped messages a day.

Ugh.

Gmail probably publishes SFP records, so hopefully most people will ignore the mail message.

By: spinifex23

spinifex23 — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 12:28:12 -0800

This has also happened to my gmail account, but not my roommate's. And yes - very very annoying. You have my sympathies.

In my case, it seems to started in the past couple of days.

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 01:23:56 -0800

While spam is fluid and difficult to setup rules for, bounces from the same mail server software tends to look the same. About a dozen rules should be able to shunt 80% of the junk into the trash. Hopefully the rest will be manageable.