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Hotmail and spoofed email 
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 7:56 pm
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I'm getting a lot of 'return to sender' type emails turning up in my Hotmail's Junk folder.
They're all in Russian, from numerous different sources (as you'd expect being returned) and all for the same email.


Anyway I can sort this out? I'm not impressed by the idea of someone spoofing my addy for spam. :evil:

PS I'm also getting
Quote:
General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Incorrect string value: '\xD0\xA0\xD0\xBE\xD0\xB1...' for column 'post_text' at row 1 [1366]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.


when I tried posting this. Post Previewed ok, but wouldn't post. I've removed the Cyrillic text that I'd copied in. Let's see if that works.

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Tue Jun 30, 2009 2:09 pm
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Not getting any here...

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Tue Jun 30, 2009 2:24 pm
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ProfessorF wrote:
Anyway I can sort this out? I'm not impressed by the idea of someone spoofing my addy for spam. :evil:

Unfortunately Prof, there's probably little or nothing you can do about it. A spoofed 'from' in an email to a non-existent address will bounce back to you rather than the originator but, obviously, you won't have anything do with it at any point it's worth stopping it. Hotmail are actually doing the right thing by dropping it in your spam folder. There's an increasing debate among the email admin community about whether we should stop sending DFR's as they now mostly consist of 'backscatter' as oppose to information useful to the recipient and most ISP email systems are now more than 99.9% reliable anyway but the other side is obviously you do want to know if an email you send doesn't make it for some reason, even if that reason is you mistyped the 'to' address by mistake.

As to the cyrillic text, it probably irrelevant. It more likely reads something like 'could not deliver your message to <some address you've never heard of> because of <some reason you can't do anything about>'.

I wouldn't worry about your address being used - it's not at all uncommon. Spammers can and do make up addresses entirely at random but when you're sending out 10m messages a day, some of them are going to turn out to be real people.

Like junk mail through your letterbox and idiots phoning you up trying to sell you things you don't want or need, it's another aspect of modern life where the pursuit of money comes before all else. The fact the email system allows it to work simply shows that once we were more polite, if perhaps also startlingly naive.

Jon


Tue Jun 30, 2009 6:45 pm
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A considerable amount of mail that is sent to me comes from my domain name, but not always my exact e-mail address. I get e-mails that are actually classified as from me and I do get the odd return to sender mail.

My ISP uses the user name as the domain e.g. @fred.isp.co.uk and it doesn't matter what you add before the @, any returned mail comes directly to me. I have noticed a huge increase in faked isp domain names recently- as opposed to totally made up e-mail addresses.

The absolutely worst thing is that if I identify an e-mail with my domain name as spam and return it to a company that itself has spam filters, it keeps coming back- kind of e-mail tennis. :x

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Tue Jun 30, 2009 6:55 pm
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