I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!
Many thanks in advance,andy
Welcome to the club! On June 1, 2003, I discovered a similar situation with
my Yahoo! Mail account. I had to set filters to dump messages from those
senders in the trash. It will pass; it is a spammer having forged your
email address as the sender in his spam run. It was three weeks before the
flood abated, and eight weeks until it turned to a trickle.
While a Swen-type virus could also cause it, I suspect it is more likely a
spammer; you generally would see something in the sender address, or
subject, if the cause was viral email.
If you know what to look for, you might even find a MailWasher bounce, or
three, in the lot. Telling you that the "user account does not exist". I
found four among my bounces; sent an email to them all. One even bounced my
email with MW; but decided to give up when I responded his second bounce!
All that you can do is ride it out. Use filters. If you are ambitious
enough to learn how to extract the encapsulated spam, and process that for
complaints to the originating mail service, and the hosting service of the
payload, you could mention "forgery" in your note to them. A shore, one
line, factual statement, "This email was apparently sent from one of your
user's computers using a forged email address as the sender"; that should
get somebody's attention. Even if the only thing that happens is that the
provider slaps the idiot's wrist, and says, "Don't ever forge an email
address again".