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

January 14, 2006 8:35 AM

My Gmail account has been Joe Jobbed... anything I can do about it?
posted by Manhasset to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

What's that in English?
posted by riffola at 8:42 AM on January 14, 2006

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.
posted by Alison at 8:45 AM on January 14, 2006

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 That's why the domain blacklisting concept is really outdated.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.
posted by riffola at 8:52 AM on January 14, 2006

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.
posted by Emperor Yamamoto's Eggs at 8:57 AM on January 14, 2006

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.
posted by eriko at 8:57 AM on January 14, 2006

Response by poster: 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.
posted by Manhasset at 9:00 AM on January 14, 2006

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.
posted by delmoi at 10:42 AM on January 14, 2006

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.
posted by spinifex23 at 12:28 PM on January 14, 2006

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.
posted by krisjohn at 1:23 AM on January 15, 2006