Can I stop spammers from faking email from my domain?

September 13, 2004 10:00 PM

Perhaps a useless and/or redundant question, but... Sleazoid off-shore prescription drug pushers are spamming using faked addresses on my domain. Is there anything I can do to stop this practice, or am I just another cog in the great wheel of spam?
posted by Dreama to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You've been joe-jobbed. Not much you can do about it but turn off default address forwarding, filter out the bounces, and let your ISP know.
posted by brownpau at 10:12 PM on September 13, 2004

Cog.

And doing what bp suggests won't actually prevent them from doing it. It will only keep you from seeing the bounced messages.
posted by crunchland at 10:27 PM on September 13, 2004

Response by poster: Default address forwarding is off, my hosting provider knows, and the bounce messages are well filtered into their own little folder in Mail.app which I don't need to pay attention to if I don't want to. I take some perverse pleasure in seeing the bounces, though. It keeps me aware of who is out there and doing such sleazy, awful things.

Why do I get the feeling that these people aren't even really selling viagra and phen-fen at all, and instead are just sucking up people's information as part of an international identity theft scheme?
posted by Dreama at 10:33 PM on September 13, 2004

Nothing in the short term, but as I understand it ISPs are moving to SPF and the like so that people can verify the sender of emails.
posted by holloway at 11:10 PM on September 13, 2004

I hear there are already spammers using SPF, but that least that means you can track them down easier with it.
posted by mathowie at 11:21 PM on September 13, 2004

for what it's worth, it's probably not personal - i think they just cycle through addresses. so, at least in my experience, it will stop after a while. this happens with addresses in my domain maybe once a month or so (although i have things configured so i may not notice - the bounces look like the virus "mail returned" things anyway).
posted by andrew cooke at 5:37 AM on September 14, 2004

I had this happen to me last week. I was really annoying for like two days, then it went away. My ISP told me there was nothing I could do about it.
posted by mkultra at 11:59 AM on September 14, 2004