For several months now i’ve been getting returned spam email i did not send, sometimes hundreds a day. Someone is sending spam and making it look like its coming from my email address, is there anything i can do to stop this? I contacted google about it and all they’ve done so far is thank me and assure me they take this very seriously. That was about six months ago and still my spam folder fills up with returned spam i didn’t send.
Really not much you can do about it. You can look at the headers of the emails to see what ISP is being used to sende them and contact their abuse department, but even if that gets one account shut down, they’ll just open up another one with a different ISP or with false information.
Well that blows, i’ve even received threatening emails about some phishing scams they tried to run about a year ago.
It happened to me this month as well. Used to get maybe 3 spams a day, but now I am getting a hundred bounced emails a day. All since I accidentially posted to Craigslist.com.
I thouht I’d clicked on the “indirect” mailbox, and didn’t notice until it was posted. Corrected it within a minute, but that was all it took.
My email service says they cannot stop it, since it doesn’t go though them at all. The whole header is faked.
So today I bought a new email service and am in the process of switching all my accounts over and mothballing the old one.
Nobody said the internet would be fair, I guess. :sigh:
It got so bad with my accounts tied to my web site, I changed web hosts and took my web site off-line for three months. The spam has dropped dramatically for these accounts and I’m about to go live with the web site, using a more secure web form where the email accounts will no longer be visible in the web page code.
The e-mail standard is inherently insecure and it is very easy to send out e-mails with altered headers that indicate another From: address and even other fun information as well. In the early days of the web, there used to be some websites that would let you send e-mail to anyone from anyone. I don’t know if they still exist but the technique hasn’t changed. I played some good jokes with them though.
Unfortunately, there is not a reasonable thing in this world that you can do to stop it. Spoofing ability is built into the most common e-mail standards.
Sometimes the complaints are the spam (or other malmail) - There’s a guy in my company that routinely receives emails saying “We [some ISP] have detected that large volumes of spam emails are being sent from your account, please open the attachment for details” - of course the attachment is some kind of trojan executable - there never actually was a spam problem.
I sort of did that yesterday. I had signed up for AngiesList, which is a site for rating local gardeners, painters, and handymen etc.
They wouldn’t take me off their mailing list, but I found out they didn’t confirm a change to your email address. So I went into my account and replaced my email address with their help address.
The page said Your Changes Have Been Completed, and now they will get their own spam newsletter.
Join the club pal.
I get loads every day, I just delete them, no sweat and nothing to get worked up about.
Matter of fact I posted a thread about this some time ago
Do you have DSL? Your email may not be spoofed.
Yes i do have DSL, what do you mean my email might not be spoofed?
I think he means someone may have tunneled into your PC and is actually sending spam from your PC. Do you have a firewall? Does it check for both inbound and outbound activity?
Is this for a GMail account? I dont think gmail is doing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records, but it would help.
There is nothing you can do about it, except changing your e-mail address. If that’s an option.