# Please stop spamming people with my address!
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [August 11, 2002, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357 "2002-08-11T03:12:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Cessandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cessandra)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2002, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/1 "2002-08-11T03:12:16Z")
ARGH!
There I am, innocently checking my mail when I get this strange message – Warning: Unable to Deliver Message “Get Hot XXX Teen Sluts & Debt Consolidation with Your New Visa Mastercard!” (you get the idea)
At first I think it’s a trick, trying to get me to read some crappy spam, so I delete it. Then I get six more. So I open it up and take a look.
Some goat-felching sperm-burping infected boil on the scrotum of humanity has been sending out spam mail with MY email addy as the return address! Just opening up the copy of Microsuck Outlook he bought from selling his gonorrheal ass to rabid dogs in heat, and writing me in as the reply-to.
Now, this is good because it means that this lovechild of a retarded cow and his sister hasn’t breached our server’s security, but it SUCKS because we can’t stop him! We’ve tracked him down several times and reported him to his ISP, but a few days later it just starts up again coming from somewhere else!
Listen you malodorous waste of skin, stop fucking sending out your shithead advertisements with my address on them! JUST STOP IT!
:wally
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### Author:  [@istara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/istara)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2002, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/2 "2002-08-11T05:47:19Z")
No - I’m getting those too.
I wish to fuck they would bring in some really tough anti-spam legislation to shut these people down. If [fax.com](http://fax.com) got screwed for spamming, [hotslutsxxx.com](http://hotslutsxxx.com) should be rogered with an eighty-food telegraph pole. (But then they’d probably enjoy it…)
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### Author:  [@Violet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Violet)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2002, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/3 "2002-08-11T06:53:22Z")
Ditto! :mad: When are we gonna see the faces of the spammers so we can _get_ them?
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### Author:  [@Bob\_Scene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bob_Scene)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2002, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/4 "2002-08-11T10:46:52Z")
What’s he advertising? Is it a website? How is the person who gets the spam supposed to contact the person who’s sending it?
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### Author:  [@Cessandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cessandra)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2002, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/5 "2002-08-11T23:56:55Z")
It’s always different, Bob. I think it’s some kind of middle-man for spam. You know, FORCE ADS FOR YOUR BUSINESS ON MILLIONS OF PISSED OFF NETIZENS! ONLY $9.95! ACT NOW!
I just can’t see that dozens of different businesses are actually using [xfgrdewq@unidentity.net](mailto:xfgrdewq@unidentity.net) as the reply-to just by coincidence.
(My actual email is [mail@unidentity.net](mailto:mail@unidentity.net) but all email sent to [anything@unidentity.net](mailto:anything@unidentity.net) goes to my main box by default. I’d set this account to have its own pop box so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, but what really gets me is that people are getting spam with my domain name attached to it.)
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### Author:  [@Go\_alien](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Go_alien)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2002, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/6 "2002-08-13T12:55:47Z")
**Cessandra** ,
Kill me if you must, but the pun must be spoken:
Are you having an unidentity crisis?😃
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### Author:  [@Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frank)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2002, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/7 "2002-08-13T13:55:28Z")
Cessandra, It may have been coincidence, but when this happened to me, changing my email password and changing the setting to NOT remember password stopped it. Since it’s your own domain, this may not be relevant.
It is irritating as hell, I agree. Almost all mine were sex. All I could think was “Oh, shit, what if my parents get one of these?!?!”
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### Author:  [@Cessandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cessandra)
#### Post date: [August 14, 2002, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/8 "2002-08-14T18:34:25Z")
While that’s good advice, This Year’s Model, there are a few problems. A) I change my password often, and never set it to remember the password; B) This isn’t a real email account, and thus doesn’t actually have it’s own password. My email is a catch-all, so no matter what address @unidentity.net you sent email to, whether it exists or not, it comes to me; and C) The thing they are doing requires no password. If you have Outlook or Outlook Express, open the program and go to Tools \> Accounts. Select your email account if necessary and hit Properties. Now, see where it says “Reply To”? You can put any email address you want into that space. When people get your spam and hit reply, that’s the address it gets sent to. See?
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### Author:  [@Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frank)
#### Post date: [August 14, 2002, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/9 "2002-08-14T22:26:47Z")
Well, **Cessandra** , I do see that your situation is far different than mine. I remember that the reply to address in the bounced emails was not mine. I wasn’t sure that I would be any help to you; now I can be sure that I wasn’t. Darn, that was my only attempted good deed yesterday.
I’m still not 100% sure why it wouldn’t require a password (for my situation). Is it that easy to just put anything in the from address? Wouldn’t it have to pass through my ISP at some point? Just wondering. At any rate, unless an expert wanders across this thread, how this is done will remain a mystery to me.
Sorry it wasn’t helpful.
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### Author:  [@Spanky\_The\_Dolphin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spanky_The_Dolphin)
#### Post date: [August 14, 2002, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-stop-spamming-people-with-my-address/123357/10 "2002-08-14T22:57:58Z")
I had something similar happen to me this week.
This Monday my dad (at his office address) and my mom (at our home address) got an e-mail from my university web-mail address - with a virus attachment (both just deleted it.) I haven’t used my account since May, and won’t until I start school again at the end of August. I only accessed it on Saturday to clean out the 100+ spam it gathered over the Summer.