Comments on: Am I Spamming You?

By: TheChrisD

TheChrisD — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:48:59 +0000

I seem to have a similar thing happening with my own domain, but rather than many addresses, it’s just my primary me address.

I’d say about eight times a day or so, I get a mail in spam claiming to come from me for Viagra. It’s really infuriating the fact that it’s happening, and I’m really annoyed at how my e-mail was able to be harvested for use in such purposes. If only there was some sort of central database or so where domains could “register” their e-mail server so that whenever an e-mail is sent to someone, their provider can check the database and if the mail comes from somewhere other than the registered server, it’s not delivered.

By: Donncha O Caoimh

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:12:13 +0000

Same has happened to me on my inphotos.org domain a few times. Really sucks :(

By: Phil O'Kane

Phil O'Kane — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:46:18 +0000

@Steve Graham - Thanks Steve, will take a look into that. @Stephen Barnes - No, but I have some VjaqrRa supeer acgtivve. It's supeer!

By: Stephen Barnes

Stephen Barnes — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:25:35 +0000

Oh! Hi Steve – I was just about to say exactly the same thing! But even chaning the email address for the Domain won’t stop it. The bounce will just go back to whatever was in the From field, regardless of any registered email address against the domain.

Sorry Phil – there’s not really anything you can do about it. If I were you I’d set a filter in Gmail to trap all the common phrases in the emails and delete them immediately.

Oh, and if you’ve got any spare “VjaqrRa pProfsEssioNal” I’ll take some ;-)

By: Steve Graham

Steve Graham — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:52:08 +0000

I think what may be happening is that your domain has been chosen by spammers for bulk mailings for the “From:” field. It’s a substantial flaw in Internet mail that you can put whatever you like in that field and nothing checks it.

The spammers are probably sending out many mails with @icedcoffee.ie as the “From:” field. When a responsible server tries to deal with a delivery failure on that, it will look up the “owner” of the domain and return the mail. Obviously bulk spam creates many failures with dead or non-existent destination addresses.

So the problem isn’t with Google, it’s with the registration of your domain. It would be very naughty to change the registered e-mail address of the owner of that domain to a non-existent one, but that would make your problem go away. Wink.