In the past week or so, I seem to be getting great amounts of those "failure notice" type mails you get from a mail server when an email could not be delivered. But they are not answers to any mails I've ever sent. I think they are some kind of spam (which is sometimes confirmed in the middle of all the code and tech-talk, "spam likelihood 99%" or such). But they don't have links to any sales pages, so I don't know how they are supposed to work.
Does anybody else notice a rise in this phenomenon?
Know how it works?
Update:
Thanks to commentors. Indeed it seems related to an old email address of mine (maccreator.com) having been used as fake return address on spam. Not long ago I took an old main address off a spam filter service, and I'd forgotten that the other email address was forwarded to that one for filtering.
5 comments:
A lot of spam has forged return addresses. If someone sends a spam with your email address as the return address and the addressee email address is invalid, you'll get the bounce message.
Does it look like that's what's happening?
Perhaps your account's been hacked, and is sending out emails for fake Cialis or something. The bouncebacks could be your hacked account trying to send to invalid addresses. Something like this happened to me on an old account I was forwarding to my current one - confusing at first, for sure.
Almost certainly a case of forged sender address.
Thanks guys. It might be. It's missing the body of the mail though, instead of strange code.
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It happened to me once 12 years ago, I still had a dialup connection! and I got about 9,000 bounce mails in one day!! I had to have my per-hour dialup chugging along all day, just downloading bounces. (Apparently it took a while to think of getting them cut off by my mail host.)
First thing I did was getting rid of my catch-all email account, because the bugger had used the domain, but not an actual account.
Then I reported his spam page and it was gone in hours.
Update:
Thanks to commentors. Indeed it seems related to an old email address of mine (maccreator.com) having been used as fake return address on spam. Not long ago I took an old main address off a spam filter service, and I'd forgotten that the other email address was forwarded to that one for filtering.
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