I am NOT a spammer!
Jun. 15th, 2003 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1In the past couple weeks, I started receiving "unable to send your message" messages from the postmaster account at AOL. Apparently someone is sending out spam messages, and using my good email address (without my good name) as the originator. As far as I know, I didn't send these messages. I always keep a copy of my outgoing mail. But that's probably not enough proof that I didn't send them and delete them immediately afterward.
Last night, I started getting deluged with them -- this time, from postmasters of various ISPs. I looked at the headers of the messages that bounced back (40 and counting), and sure enough, the headers were forged. However, these new mesages list someone else's name instead of mine (which I guess is a good thing).
It's relatively easy to forge headers in email mesasges -- too easy. I've received spam from people who set the message date anywhere from 5 years in the past to 20 years in the future. SpamAssassin (the spam-marking software my ISP uses) looks for this and adds 4.0 points to the spam score if it detects a forged "Date:" heading. (I think the threshold is a 24-hour deviation from the current time.) I do not know if they use a similar test for a forged "From:" heading.
And with the spammer-blacklist sites out there like spews.org, if they get a copy of these messages, they'll think I'm a spammer, and block my entire sites's email traffic from being recived because, in their view, they do business with a spammer.
Other than looking at all the headers of these messages, I have no way of tracing where these messages are really coming from. Is it part of some nasty virus that's making the rounds this week? Or is someone (probably from the Icafe group) intentionally sending these out? (They did warn me in one of their spam messages that something like this would happen to me -- that a virus would be placed on my motherboard. Yeah right.)
I sent a note to my ISP's support team advising them of the situation. I'm awaiting a response; I hope to get one tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll set up a filter or rule in my email program to automatically redirect all "returned mail" messages to a special folder....and find out how I can "Fight Back".
Last night, I started getting deluged with them -- this time, from postmasters of various ISPs. I looked at the headers of the messages that bounced back (40 and counting), and sure enough, the headers were forged. However, these new mesages list someone else's name instead of mine (which I guess is a good thing).
It's relatively easy to forge headers in email mesasges -- too easy. I've received spam from people who set the message date anywhere from 5 years in the past to 20 years in the future. SpamAssassin (the spam-marking software my ISP uses) looks for this and adds 4.0 points to the spam score if it detects a forged "Date:" heading. (I think the threshold is a 24-hour deviation from the current time.) I do not know if they use a similar test for a forged "From:" heading.
And with the spammer-blacklist sites out there like spews.org, if they get a copy of these messages, they'll think I'm a spammer, and block my entire sites's email traffic from being recived because, in their view, they do business with a spammer.
Other than looking at all the headers of these messages, I have no way of tracing where these messages are really coming from. Is it part of some nasty virus that's making the rounds this week? Or is someone (probably from the Icafe group) intentionally sending these out? (They did warn me in one of their spam messages that something like this would happen to me -- that a virus would be placed on my motherboard. Yeah right.)
I sent a note to my ISP's support team advising them of the situation. I'm awaiting a response; I hope to get one tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll set up a filter or rule in my email program to automatically redirect all "returned mail" messages to a special folder....and find out how I can "Fight Back".
