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Security & Privacy

Spam forgery

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 17 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

Someone’s sending spam (in Russian and Spanish) using my email address in the To: header of their messages. Not a huge deal, it happens all the time. Anyone charged with defending against spam is savvy to this particular ruse and generally ignores the To header.

But this scumbag is also inserting a forged "Received" header, a message ID, and a return-path header that seems to indicate that my server is sending the spam. It’s all faked, and the server logs show that none of this traffic exists. In fact, the forged headers even specify that I’m using a mail transfer agent that isn’t even installed on the server.

Still, the cleanup from this is a bit of a pain.

Comments

Clangnuts
April 26, 2007 6:26 PM

This first page of your blog appears to be adverts only on my screen res! It's too big. I almost didn't scroll down, and would have missed you true content, thinking I was on an ad blog.

Adewale
May 7, 2007 11:52 AM

So what did you do to this scumbag because I have a very similar problem only that it was done on a site I developed for a bank where they were sending fraudulent emails through our email account and also trying to steal credit card details. What can be done to prevent them and also protecting the useage of our email accounts.

Roberth
May 11, 2007 3:55 PM

I has always self wondered what can we do to beat those bastards or atleast how to protect our email addresses from those ?

This discussion has been closed.

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