undelivered mail spam

jenks

jenks

thread death
I'm not a technological whizz and so am asking for a bit of help here.

In the last week my inbox has been clogged up with 'undelivered messages' that have been bounced back to me from all over europe and yet i have not sent these messages in the first place.

Anything i can do to end the 20-30 messages a day? Obviously i haven't opened any of the attachments but would like to go to my inbox and only find the usual stocks spam and viagra spam which are much more manageable;)
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Thanks John but the problem with many of them is that they are not marked as spam but as messages which have been 'returned' to me because they are undeliverable. Therefore they slip through any kind of spam filter.

A second question is, I suppose, what's the point in them doing this i.e clogging up my inbox?
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
I think they as a result of spam being sent using a faked up version of your email address or domain.

If you look at the messages you may be able to see what address/titles they are using and filter that out?

It happens to me occasionally with stuff being sent from sdjsoijfa@uncarved.org or whatever - if spam is sent to email addresses that don't exist it will bounce back to uncarved.org
 
sufi

sufi

lala
i got at least 1000 of these over about 48 hours at the weekend replying to some domain i registered ages ago ....:eek: :) :p
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
I get tons of these Jenks, with someone faking up the domain name of a site I run. Other than the annoyance of lots and lots of junk email that your spam filters won't pick up, it doesn't actually harm you in any way (for a while I was worried someone had hacked the domain name, eg, but it turns out that's not what happens).

The unfortunate thing is that, last time I looked (about six months ago), there's no easy way to stop the emails coming. The best thing to do is, like John says, set up a message filter on your email to automatically send bogus things straight to your junk folder. Usually bounce back emails will be from fake addresses that use your domain name. You need to set up a filter that takes anything in which the 'to' field contains 'jenks.com' (or whatever your domain name is) but the to field isn't 'jenks@jenks.com' (or whatever legitimate addresses you have set up), and move everything that's left into your junk. You still get a lot of emails, but you can safely ignore them, and delete them en masse every now and then. (If you want a more detailed walk-through of how to set up filters, send me a pm.)

Mind you, I did get one chap in Canada email me threatening legal action. I explained what was going on and he shut up at that point. (Note to everyone: replying to spam is not smart - it's your best guarantee of getting lots more.)
 
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