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

Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this article.

I have exactly the same problem as John (JPL). The same website promotion (WWW.USAHOMEMEDS.BIZ). And every 5 minutes, i get an email telling me something about "Delivery Status Notification".

The header information (original IP etc.) is different in every mail. I think someone uses infected workstations for sending.

I hope this annoying spam ends soon....

Christian

Hey all, found this page through google..

I too am recieving at least 60 failure notices daily regarding this USAHOMEMEDS.BIZ crap. Quite an operation they have going, makes you wonder how many messages actually go through.

While it's highly likely that the spammer is using compromised systems, USAHOMEMEDS.BIZ would have hired them, no? Does anyone know if they be held legally responsible under the anti-spam laws (I havent looked them up at all)?

Eric

I'm not a lawyer, but ... I don't believe that the company who's products are being sold is neccessarily liable ... it's the company that's doing the advertising campaign (typically a third party). That being said, there are definitely proposals to go after the businesses being advertised ... the problem is they can always claim "we had no idea, we hired these marketters over here".

Personally I'm not convinced we can sue our way out of this.

Leo

I own a domain ... and, in that domain I have it set to receive all email that's sent to ANYTHING @ mydomain.com. Well, this morning, I received 126 "returned mail" messages, and looking at the headers, I could see that they were sent "from" all sorts of different usernames @ mydomain.com. There was no rhyme or reason to the subject matter ... some were spam-related, others seemed to definitely be virus-related. I guess my question is ... Has my domain been compromised, or my email, or my computer? Or all of the above? I've turned off the feature on my website that forwards all email to me, no matter what the info before "@" is, but this will only make it so that I'm not bothered with the returned mail. It won't fix the problem, right? Is there anywhere that I can report all this abuse? I obviously want to delete all the messages, but want to make sure first that there isn't somewhere I can forward them. I mean, this IS illegal, isn't it?

Thanks for any advice ...

It's a classic case of *exactly* what this article is all about. You've not been compromised, it's not your fault, and there's nothing you can really do. Tracking is almost impossible, and there's nowhere to report the level of information you do have. Sucks, I know. I'm in the same situation with a couple of domains. In my case my junk mail filter (Outlook 2003's built in) works really well at filtering out the junk. I've noticed that many of the "bounces" are actually to a handfull of bogus addresses @ my domain. If your emailer supports any kind of rules, you could simply auto-delete mail sent to those addresses you know are bogus.

And yes, it's illegal: there's a virus writer out there that deserves some serious jail time, in my opinion.

Leo

I have been experiencing the problem with apparent unauthorized usage of my email (returned mail that I never sent). There are some other things that have occurred within the same time frame and I am wondering if they are related. By the way I have changed my email and computer passwords and the problems persist. The other things that happened are:
1. I was unable to change the internet options on IE6. An error message appeared saying that this was restricted and I should contact the system administrator (me!). This was corrected by going back a month with the system restore.
2. The other anomaly is that my Norton firewall keeps turning off and and the intrusion protections is also deactivated. The options in Norton are set so this should not happen. It does each time I reboot.
I run virus scans every few days and have never been "infected" according to Norton. I have had a few rejected emails and a few intrusion alerts.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

Well, there is a small chance you are still infected with a virus ... not all scanners catch all viruses, and some viruses are good at hiding from the scanners. Try one of the other scanners (there are free on-line one's that I'd use for this purpose), and see if they report anything.

Also spyware may be suspect as well. Especially for the IE behaviour you described. Grab a copy of Spybot or Ad-Aware and run those scans as well.

(Links on my recommendations page: http://pugetsoundsoftware.com/recommend.html )

Best of luck,

Leo

Same thing is happening to me as Heide above - except I'm getting fewer - about ten failed delivery notices each day relating to invented names at my own domain, plus a few 'virus warning' replies from other companies. If a virus is spoofing my email address how likely do you think it is that providers might put a block on mail from our domain, which would mean that our legitimate business mail wouldn't get through? What would we do if this happens?

i've read all these questions but didn't see any answers to them of what to do. i'm getting failed messages from people i never heard of. changed my password and it didn't do anything. if i changed my email address would this help as they are using mine now.

Glenn: 'likely', probably not any more, since most email administrators are now aware of this issue. However it is, unfortunately, still possible. Wrong. But possible.

Leo

To post a comment on "Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?!", please return to that article's main page.