Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?!

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One other thing that was not pointed out is spammers. I received a bounced mail message that was spam. I didn't send the original message, but the bounced mail message came back to me because the spammer had used my email address as the return address.

The actual sender may be listed in the header information

Talking about information being available in the headers... What are the chances that mail gateways and virus scanners become intelligent enough to know when a "From:" field is spoofed? I mean - the information is there about who the *actual* person is who sent it. Why not extract that? This could have a siginifcant impact on viruses specifically.

Is tehre any specific reason why this is *not* done? I can't believe that nobody have thought about this before, so, there must be some reason for it not being like this...

Regards,

Kobus

Well, there are two problems: 1) *all* the information in mail headers can be spoofed - meaning you're not guaranteed that you know who the actual person is. 2) Many mailers get it "wrong" ... meaning that legitimate email can often not pass the type of test you're talking about. Many mail servers have the ability to enable additional checking along those lines ... when I turned that on on my server I started losing about 2% of *legitimate* email.

If there's to be a real solution, IMO it needs to be with some fundamental protocol changes that will formally validate the sender. There are proposals out there, but wide scale adoption fo any is a way out, I think.

Leo

I just had about 30 emails bounced back to me saying undeliverable that i never sent out. I dont know if there is any way i can take care of this. From what I understand (and read above) there isnt any. Can you shed anymore light on this situation? It would really be appreciated

I'm not exactly sure what more light I can shed. Is there perhaps something specific I didn't address in the article that I can answer for you?

Leo

I have a dormant yahoo account that I quit using two months ago, just last week I thought to check it and found failed delivery notices with mydoom attachments (sent to addresses I know nothing about). For the past two weeks I have tried contacting yahoo, changing passwords, but have been unable to do either, the problem is persisting. How can I close the account and find out the origination.

My advice: just stop looking at the account. Forget it exists. Yahoo will clean it up and remove it eventually.

Here's the deal: the problem isn't at your end, nor potentially even at Yahoo's. It's that your yahoo email address, for whatever reason, has been used by a third party who's infected with a virus, as outlined in the article above. There's nothing you or Yahoo can actually do.

So if you truly no longer need the Yahoo account ... just ignore it.

Leo

My situation is exactly above. But the bounced back email reveals a business that is being promoted. I did a whois search and found a name and phone number. I'm really tempted to call as i imagine that the person who is selling this crap is involved somehow. But i"m sure he'll just deny it.

The website is:
WWW.USAHOMEMEDS.BIZ

it's really pissing me off. I'm letting my domain hosting company look into it more first before I lose my cool.

Any thoughts?

JPL

Unless you have hard data to show that it's being done intentionally, my opinion is that you're wasting your time. Fact is, as the article outlines, it's quite possible that it *is* unintentional. At best you might track down someone who's machine is infected with a virus. Whether or not they'll appreciate being informed is anyone's guess. Spammers do fake return addresses on purpose, but they tend to use invalid ones rather than real ones.

Good luck, whatever direction you take.

Leo

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