Not sure if anyone on AVD can help but looks like something weird is going on with my email (not hotmail etc).

Today I've got almost 2000 emails mostly replies from spam blocking software or mailer deamon etc saying message undeliverable. So what I can see its like my email is sending out all these messages (but not sure) to random addresses.....none of which I have in my contacts or whom I have ever seen. Some of them are coming back in Chinese or Japanese etc....

I use outlook and can't figure out how to stop it as I am receiving rediculous numbers of email its driving me insane.

Any help is appreciated!
Al

Hi Alan,
The internet email protocol has a fundamental security design flaw. For example, someone could easily find out my website name (which is modulus.com.au) and then send a spam email purporting to come from, e.g. fubar@modulus.com.au, with the reply address as also fubar@modulus.com.au (the apmmers don't want to receive replies for obvious reasons). The body of the emial might have a virus attachment or might be an ad. for pills to upsize your love cannon, with another website address. As the spammers send to millions of email addresses, a portion will get replies (as you're getting). This process is known as "email spoofing". If I do not have the address fubar@modulus.com.au set up, I will never know this is happening*. If, however, I have a "catch-all" email handler which sends all email received to modulus.com.au to my real email address, I will get flooded.

There is, AFAIK, no way to prevent email spoofing due to the protocol design flaw. All you can do is to ensure that your email set up does NOT have catch-all handling of email, so you don't get them. Of course, if they send the spam purporting to come from "peter.hill@modulus.com.au" (my real email address), I'll still get them, but this is rarer.

* Although you don't know it's happening, your email address can end up black-banned as being mistaken for a spammer.

I hope this helps; in compensation can you paint my truck for free?

hth

Do you have a website?

Sounds more like you have a script on your webspace.

The exploit to relay mail does exist but generally most web space providers now require authentication to access outgoing mail servers - the mail has to be sent locally from a script (mail() php function) to exploit it as a spam relay.

The messages you are getting are probably just a SMALL PORTION of those messages sent - usually those here the email addresses do not exist or where they have been detected as spam and bounced back.

Check your web space and look for something that's not supposed to be there - a file / folder / both.

Delete it and change your passwords for something much stronger.

lol - just noticed your site in your sig.

Check your webspace It's probably been compromised.

Like the site BTW - how is this project?