Adventures in Web Application Develompent by Phil Duba: Email Hijacked?

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Email Hijacked?

Posted On July 17, 2008 7:21 PM By Phil in Other

I have an email address I use just for this blog and not too long ago, I opened up Thunderbird to download my mail and had a ton of "Undeliverable Message" emails waiting for me. I am assuming that my email address is being spoofed and these are spammer hacks at email addresses on other systems that don't exist. So two questions: has this happened to anyone else and if so, what did you do? I'm hoping I don't have to abandon this email address, but who knows. Thanks in advance!

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Yeah, it's pretty normal.

# By Name | 7/17/08 10:42 PM

Depending on what types of bounces you're receiving, it's either a "joe job" or backscatter. Both are fairly common occurrences. Either has the potential to be much worse if you use a catchall on your domain because then the spammers can create random invalid addresses for every single message.

There are a number of ways to minimize the problem, but there isn't currently any way to completely eliminate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_%28e-mail...

# By John Wise | 7/18/08 10:16 AM

Thanks John, I did the SPF working with HostMySite which looks like it will help with the latter one and I'll take a look at the "joe job" stuff to see what could be done there. Thanks again for the resources!

# By Phil Duba | 7/18/08 10:33 AM

philduba.com