05/21/2002 Entry: "Get Bad Karma Now! Ask Me How!"

Earlier today I was laughing at dumb spam email titles ("Homosexual Lesbians Get it On!" "Collage(sic) Singles In their Dorm") Now I'm concerned about spam in a slightly more personal way. I just got a failure notice from Yahoo that it couldn't deliver my email "Want a Bigger Penis?" to at least five recipients on my list. That's fine, except, of course, that I never sent any such email. I'm not entirely sure (forged email headers still confuse me a little,) but it appears that someone used a random email address with my other domain name as their spoofed "From" and "Reply-to" email addresses. Lovely. Time will tell if this is what happened, and how many people their list included.

An idle thought: would vegetarian email solicitors send out Wham instead?

UPDATE: Of course Abuse recognised it as a forged address immediately: "When a spammer forges mail in your domain, it is very irritating, but there is little we can do directly to stop this. The best you can do initially is just report this incident to the spammer's providers as normal. See this good guide on complaining to a spammer's provider." Yup, did that, and got no response. If I can ever find the spammer, I could sue them for defamation, though it would likely be expensive and time-consuming. At least the response (canned or otherwise) was appropriate, well-written and respectful, which makes me all the happier with my hosting service.

Replies: One Comment

I started getting those bounce messages a couple of months ago myself. Started me at first, too. Nothing bad happened so I ignore them.

Yes, I can do a mean ostrich impression.

Posted by Mark @ 05/21/2002 07:05 PM PST