email attack? (1 Viewer)

[Joe Wong]

Hi all,

looks like my email is being bombarded with "delivery failure" emails. Anyone know what I can do to stop these? Not too familiar with this continuous spam. Seems like one is being sent every few secs.

Thanks!

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

There really isn't anything you can do about this, other than setting a rule to immediately delete anything with the subject line, "Delivery Failure'. (Which means you'll also miss any legit delivery failure messages produced by mail you actually sent, but under the circumstances that might be a small price to pay.)

The messages you are getting aren't spam, they're the result of spam. The problem is that you have no control over said spam, so you can't stop the delivery failures.

Here's what's happening:

Some spammer got hold of your e-mail address. Could have come from the address book of somebody you know who got hit with a virus, from a data-mining program that scans websites where e-mail address are displayed or a buch of other places. The spammer sends out a bunch of messages to people and "spoofs" the return address to make it look like the mail is coming from you. (Or me, or one of the two or three hundred other e-mail addresses they're using this week.) These messages are going to e-mail addresses that they also stole from somebody's address book or mined from the web. A certain percentage of these are going to be old, out-of-date or no good for some other reason. Those will generate delivery failure messages (as with some e-mail system spam filters or nanny programs that filter based on subject matter or language.) Since the offending e-mail appears to have come from your adddress, that's where the delivery failure messages go.

I once had a customer who got hit with a mass-mailing virus. Our company's [email protected] address was in their address book, and was one of the ones the virus spoofed. We were getting hundreds of delivery failure messages per hour for several days.

The good news is eventually the spammer stops using your address and moves onto the next name in its list and all those messages stop.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joe Wong]

Thanks Joe!

So it will eventually stop? My fear is this is an automated attack that won't stop!

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

It isn't an attack on you at all.

You are just collateral damage. And yes, it will stop. Spammers always switch the stolen addresses that they hide behind.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joe Wong]

Joe,

it's slowing down, so fingers crossed!

Thanks again.

Joe